On What Next?

On Friday night, twenty minutes before Saturday morning, I click the submit button. I think about how it would be nice to win something like this, a prize, some validation, a room of one’s own to breathe, then write. It takes me back to the top of my application. I have missed several mandatory sections, apparently, like the boxes that tell the judges that I am white; from an upper-middle class background; cisgender; heterosexual; a woman. I am tempted not to bother at all. But click the button again because the work has been done and I am on my third wine. The long list, I am told in a confirmation email, will be announced at the end of September. I shut my laptop and swallow the last of the liquid in my glass, knowing well I will be able to think of nothing else until then.

My first week of classes are sombre. I can sense the teachers empathising with the grid of faces on the screen, particularly the main teacher who speaks about the online parameters with a certain guilt. Nobody thought, could have thought, this is how we would be made to finish our degree; in the midst of a global pandemic, more or less alone and dependant on one’s internet connection. Daisy asks me if I will frame my certificate. She says she will. I haven’t really thought about it.

I wake up one blank day to the colour grey, it is everywhere. Low clouds have swallowed the usually visible city beyond our bedroom window. It’s as if someone has tucked Melbourne into bed, blanketed it in layers of fluffy sheets. I remember my new book. Eventually, the clouds break like surface mould on water and the pages open in my hands are cast in a warm morning light. The grey gives way to a cool blue. I push the glass up, and evening falls out the window. The air this morning quenches this body like cold milk; I didn’t realise how thirsty I was.

At one point my book addresses me. Reader, what stills your heart? I stop reading to think about this. A picnic. Multiple courses. Italy. The first moment of an orgasm. A wide horizon. Brave syntax. The right shade of yellow. I start thinking about how I haven’t seen the horizon in weeks. I remember reading about how the horizon is a natural anti-anxiety, that, whether they know it or not, this quality is why humans migrate to dwell closer to the coastline. I suddenly feel hungry for the wide horizon I have listed and all that it imbues on this body.

My old high-school laptop can’t make it through an hour long lecture without being tethered to a charger. I browse the online Apple Shop. T says I ought to buy one before October because in the adult world you have to pay for Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint. But I only need Word, I say. It doesn’t work like that, he says. On Tuesday, when I type words and they appear delayed, laggy and not how I intended, I see I do not have a choice. Apple is summoning me the way they summon us all.

In the middle of a class, I browse emails. I am trying to locate a piece I submitted to a small journal in the holiday period. This is something I do in the space between submission and either rejection or acceptance: I reread and scrutinise every word, comma, capital letter. Sifting through, I notice many spam emails from places like Michaels Camera Store, Spotify, Booktopia, Amazon, Clickfrenzy. All the bolded, unopened emails, with too-long subject lines make me feel dirty, like I need an exfoliating shower. I click unsubscribe so many times. I’m in an unsubscribe trance. Are you sure? some will ask. I hear my teacher address the class: Okay great work everyone, see you on Thursday. And I see I’m in an email from November, twenty-eighteen.

I read through my notes from the holidays. There is one from the residency:

My peers in this ‘at home residency’ have been reduced to squares on a filthy screen. Some of them have Vegemite and dark Kit Kat on their virtual faces from lost of the eating while working I have been doing lately. One woman, an older student called Jenny, is always chewing and staring into the distance like no-one is watching, but we are all watching.

On a Thursday, the last one in July, I buy a Tattslotto ticket to enter the Saturday night draw. My sister and I split the more expensive ticket because we agree, ten million each is plenty. The lady at the newsagent grins a heartfelt good-luck to us, even goes as far to stick up both her thumbs as we walk out onto the street robust with possibility. I study our numbers. Beginners luck only applies once, I say. T pins it next to the door. People are made to acknowledge by way of a kiss as they come and go. For three days my sister, her partner, T and I talk about what we will do with our money. For three days I think about my bookstore in an attainable, three-dimensional way.

I throw out two pairs of shoes then buy two new pairs. My foot has grown, I say into my phone. But how can that be! Mum says. She feels distant and close at the same time. I picture her walking around the house sweeping, probably, then staring out the dirty windows she keeps telling me she wants to clean. I can see her blue denim jeans hugging her nimble legs. She has red lipstick on, reapplied to be the brightest kind. She is sipping a gin and tonic.

After three years, I finally make a friend in my course. While our friendship became so virtually; it feels somewhat genuine. T can’t understand why it’s taken me -a social, chatty person with plenty of friends outside the academy- this long. T doesn’t understand the nature of my course, how it is filled with misfits, egos and people who prefer to spend most of there free time with books, fictive and otherwise. When ninety-percent of the class deem, with seldom justification, Chee’s work average, I see why I have made no alliances so far. When my new friend chimes in at the same time I do, voicing her disagreement with ninety-percent of the class, I know I want our friendship to exist beyond the academy, beyond the October finale.

Over antipasto at T’s parents place, his businessman Dad asks me what it is I plan to do once I finish in October. You do finish in October, don’t you? Yes, I say, I do. My hands break down a toothpick I had been using to politely pluck olives from the mix, then another, then another. I open my mouth to see if the blankness in my head translates to anything. It doesn’t. There is a thin woody mess on the thick marble bench and I wipe it onto my lap. I watch him watch the skin on my face turn red. It’s works like a mirror. Oh not to worry, plenty of time, he says in a voice I haven’t quite heard before.

On Saturday evening we gather with a sense of occasion. There are now two tickets by the door. The number twenty-six has been drawn two-hundred and sixty-eight more times than the other numbers, my sister’s partner says. I count seven twenty-sixes on the wall. We sit, our body parts crossed, eating anchovy toasts, sipping wine and emitting positive, millionaire energy. My sister enters ‘what to do when you win Tattslotto’ into a search engine.

1. Take a breath
2. Give it time to settle in
3. Don’t immediately tell everyone you know
4. Get to know your relationship with money
5. Put together a plan with financial advice

In his essay on writing, Alexander Chee composes one-hundred dot points on his experience. Which, upon reading, and re-reading, I see directly translates to my own experience. In it, he says,

13. Typically, a novelist’s family will not believe the novelist to be someone who does ‘real’ work, even after the publication of many novels.

14. It is said that families should try not to punish their writers. I am the one who said it.