Letter to George Clooney

by Debra Adelaide

  Not only was my mentor unable to answer these questions, she looked at me as if I were a species of vermin. Finally, on the last day, I had found her seated at the back of a small room smoking a cigarette out of the window.

  She told me to sit and pushed some forms at me.

  ‘Publishers. Conference committee. They’re after details,’ she said.

  ‘More details?’

  She shrugged. I had already filled in forms and answered questionnaires when I was selected. When my manuscript was selected. She shrugged again, saying she was just a freelancer, funded by the conference trust and the local council, just doing what they asked. I signed the forms and pushed them back. I wondered how much she was paid to sit here on the last afternoon and blow smoke in my face. The mentors were meant to be professional writers and editors. I asked if she had written books too, if she was an author.

  ‘Freelancer,’ she said ambiguously.

  Somehow I already knew that she would ignore my folder too.

  When I got back home on the Sunday night I threw my suitcase into the corner of the bedroom and headed for the spare room with my notes.

  ‘I’ll have to be set up properly in here,’ I called out to Curtis in the kitchen. ‘Your friends won’t be able to stay the night any more. And the kids’ toys will have to go back in their room.’ I kicked a plastic dinosaur out the door and tossed three stuffed animals onto the bed. Then I took them and the other toys off the bed. I needed it to set out all my notes and drafts. I was dismantling the Thomas the Tank Engine train set that took up half the floor when Rosie walked in, sucking a finger.

  ‘Sorry, petal. All this has to go. Clean sweep. Mummy’s gotta write.’

  ‘So you got the book deal?’ Curtis appeared in the doorway.

  ‘Yeah. Well, I signed something.’ I pulled Rosie’s finger out of her mouth.

  Over the next few weeks I learned that the greatest impediment to writing was not the children, not the TV, not even the lure of the refrigerator, but the telephone. The phone calls anywhere between three and eight-thirty, from telemarketers, consumer researchers and someone offering me a free holiday if I attended their investment seminar. I couldn’t unplug the phone and I couldn’t ignore it. Sometimes I did ignore it. But after five or six rings I would give in, then after I’d growled into the phone and returned to my desk, forget what I was going to write. If Jay had been a few years older I’d have asked him to take messages. Curtis had not a clue what I was going through.

  ‘You try being creative at home,’ I told him. ‘You try pulling an entire story together and keeping the household running. And that bloody phone. What do we need one for anyway?’

  But I knew why. The third week back, still no contact.

  ‘Haven’t you already written it? Isn’t that manuscript what they contracted?’

  The ignorance of some people. ‘Duh. As if I won’t be pressured for the next one. Gotta have that ready when they want it. Besides,’ I gestured at the dog-eared folder, ‘this needs a complete rewrite.’

  One afternoon I was staring at the blank space on the screen where I had just deleted two paragraphs. They had to go but then I panicked at the sight of this big hole that needed filling. My head felt as empty as the page before me. If I stared at it long enough maybe the words would bore through to the screen from my pupils.

  When the phone rang, for once I was grateful. Though I quickly regretted agreeing to take part in the survey.

  ‘How much of your weekly income is spent on takeaway food?’

  Instead of answering, I asked, ‘What are you reading right now?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘What book are you reading? You are reading one, aren’t you?’

  She mentioned a title I had never heard of. The author’s name sounded fake. Edwina Montgomery. Either that or she’d died in 1939.

  ‘Name her other titles,’ I demanded.

  ‘Return to Galaxy Red. Journey to the Edge of Time. The Starship Propheticus,’ she said. ‘Science fiction.’

  ‘Speculative fiction,’ I hissed into the phone. That much I’d learned from the conference.

  What I did not learn from the conference was why so many of these authors were stuck in the old millenniums. All those books about medieval travellers, the taming of dragons, the quests for sacred swords and magic stones and shimmering portals that transported unlikely heroes to other worlds . . . What did this have to do with the new millennium? When someone mentioned adult fantasy I examined these titles in the book display and, no, they were not sealed and black with R-rating stickers, though I couldn’t help imagining leather bras and purple glow-in-the-dark dildos. They were fat and colourful, the covers embossed in gold. The blurbs mentioned battles, lost jewels and magic talismans. Fiery hearts and pure minds and kingdoms and keys and ravens. I wondered what the difference was between adult fantasy and children’s. I flipped through each one, scanning the storylines. No sex. Chaste embraces. Kisses on rings or hands, when warlords met or wise men bestowed blessings. Adult fantasy seemed very innocent.

  I became obsessed with organising my time. I spent so much time planning how I would organise my days, I did not have time to write. I was stuck between ten (or twelve) years and six weeks. I alternately despised both Thin Nervous and Code Six, but then I knew that Thin Nervous had won two literary awards while Code Six had sold over 80,000 copies of his book.

  In ten years Thin Nervous had devoted herself to writing 26,000 words. (While at the book display I had counted them – it was easier than reading them.) That was exactly fifty words a week. But fifty words a week divided into 7.12 words each day, and how could you write a fraction of a word? And she must have written half or quarter sentences since some of her sentences were much longer than that. At what point did you divide words into fractions?

  As for Code Six, I imagined him sitting there with the clock set like Trollope and laughing at us all while running off just under three thousand words every evening after dinner. Probably all before eleven pm, the bastard. Of course being in finance he wouldn’t have to muck around with the washing-up or the kitchen floors after dinner; he could just disappear into his study. But I still wanted to know how he did it. Six weeks. Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks, but then he cheated. One of his chapters was only five words long. My mother is a fish. If only I could write chapters like that and win the Nobel Prize.

  The phone rang. There was the familiar lag and crackle before a voice said, ‘Good morning, madam, how are you?’ but it was not a Bombay accent.

  ‘It’s afternoon.’

  ‘Oh sorry, ma’am. How are you this afternoon?’

  ‘Who is calling please?’

  ‘I am calling from Mordern.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Mordern. Have you heard of Mordern, ma’am?’

  ‘No. Where is it?’ It sounded like a place in a fantasy saga. Perhaps Annals created it. Or Code Six. I didn’t mind, I would have liked to go there.

  But Mordern was not a place, it was a company that made roller-shutter blinds and I said not interested thanks and placed the phone down as the guy was asking me to reconsider.

  How hard could it be? They were only words, after all. Not anything difficult like microbes or atomic particles. And it was not like developing a vaccine for testicular cancer or isolating the gene that causes Down syndrome. I was not meant to solve any of Fermat’s remaining theorems or even understand them. Writing a thesis on the Brahmagupta–Fibonacci identity or completing the Gold Coast Triathlon or interviewing Tom Cruise or discovering a way to reverse baldness – all those things were really hard.

  What about those people who engraved pictures on grains of rice, or built entire sailing ships inside bottles? If they could do that, then I could write a second children’s story of under 30,000 words by the end of the year.

  ‘What book are you reading?’ I demanded of the person who called to sell me tickets in an art-union lottery.

  ‘Tom Clancy�
�s The Archimedes Effect,’ he said as if it were right beside him.

  Even so, I was a step ahead. ‘Incorrect. Are you aware that Tom Clancy did not write this book? That his name is a brand for the Net Force series?’

  ‘Ah . . . no.’

  ‘And that the real authors of this novel are writing under sublicensing agreements?’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. Their names are Steve Perry and Larry Segriff.’

  ‘Oh, okay.’

  ‘Can I help you with anything else today?’

  ‘Er, no.’

  ‘Thank you for calling,’ I said before I hung up.

  I began to see my target audience. They were lashed to a frame by the ankles and wrists, while my story arrowed its way right through a bullseye painted on their chest. Shoot, shoot, shoot. I reached my target audience again and again, until they slumped on the frame, blood leaking down to pool at their feet.

  You are not a writer, the convenor of Professionalising the Creative had said, if you don’t write every single day of your life. If you don’t wake up and write your dreams or make notes or plan your day’s work. I ensured that I had a notebook and sharp pencil beside the bed. When I woke up I grabbed them – but before I fixed my glasses and stopped yawning, Jay raced in and jumped on the bed, and my dream vanished like water out of a bathtub.

  PB was right. Writing sucks. Words were sly, mendacious, untrustworthy, treacherous, dirty, rotten scheming BASTARDS OF THINGS! I hated them more than anything. I wrote and wrote and those slippery words, those stinking lousy mongrel BASTARDS, disappeared from the page sideways, upwards, anyways. Anything but stay in place on the line, forming nice tidy sentences, one after the other. Pinning them down on the computer screen was like trying to pick up mercury with chopsticks. They rolled and slid away from me whenever I got close. I yelled at the screen. ‘I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you!’ Why couldn’t I write my story with numbers instead?

  ‘I hate words so much!’ I told them one night, slamming the keyboard up and down on the desk. Rosie was doing well with books up until that point. I grabbed The Very Hungry Caterpillar from her hands and tossed it aside. ‘Forget it, they’ll only turn around and betray you when you’re older! Look at me, all these words around and do you think I can get a single one to make any sense?’

  She started to cry. Curtis hissed at me, ‘Grow up, why don’t you! You’re only trying to write, for god’s sake, not trying to solve the riddle of the fucking phoenix.’

  ‘But I have a deadline,’ I wailed as he slammed the door to the kids’ room in my face.

  ‘Whatever.’

  ‘And it’s sphinx,’ I called through the door. ‘It’s the riddle of the sphinx.’

  Thank you for attending the Writing the Millennium Conference. Please note the conditions for the submission of manuscripts:

  The date of final submission is not negotiable.

  Manuscripts received after this date will not be considered.

  Manuscripts must be hard copy and not emailed.

  Please indicate by return email if you will be complying with these conditions.

  No, it didn’t sound like a contract. Curtis used the same email address. I printed the email out, then deleted it, then hid the printed email between the pages of a second-hand copy of Gone with the Wind.

  ‘No distractions!’ I announced. ‘No distractions until I’m finished my final draft.’ I listed all the things I wouldn’t do: the ironing, picking up toys, making beds, changing the sheets unless it was absolutely essential. Within a week I refined my list: no more washing, shopping, cooking. I looked in the cupboards. There was plenty of tinned food, cereal, instant noodles, packets of biscuits. We had enough food to last for months. Millions of people in other countries lived off barley soup and plain rice; so could we.

  One evening Curtis came home to find Jay feeding Rosie peanut butter on stale mini toasts while I gazed at the computer screen and scratched at my dandruff.

  ‘I’m going to the supermarket for fresh food,’ he said, picking Rosie up as if she needed an emergency infusion of green vegetables. As an afterthought he asked if I needed anything.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, deleting the ninth sentence in the last half-hour. ‘I need adjectives. Bring me some nice fresh adjectives.’

  He shut the door.

  ‘No, make that verbs,’ I called out.

  I had a deadline.

  ‘You make it sound like something bad,’ said Curtis, he heard it so much.

  But it was bad. How could something called deadline be good? Pages and pages of prose, and what for but a deadline. As if their fate was to be killed, victims of some distant war. All those words, tens of thousands of them. The infantry of prose, the front line. How could I have hated them so much? Poor little soldiers, lying flat and lifeless on the line, their letters dripping off the pages, clotting and staining everything beneath. I would have felt more sorry for them if I hadn’t been so worried about my manuscript. Maybe those dead lines could join my target audience, shot through the heart, left to bleed out there somewhere, under the pitiless sun. In the mud. On the beach.

  ‘What an imagination,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘It’s not a compliment.’

  One day Annals materialised beside me at the washbasins in the women’s toilets. We rinsed and shook our hands in unison. She leaned over the basin to inspect her perfect face in front of the mirror. Her hair fell forward in a silent swoosh then rippled over her shoulders and down her back when she stood straight again. The water wound down the plughole, as if reluctant to leave her.

  Please note the following additional conditions:

  Authors whose work is accepted will be contacted by telephone.

  We are unable to provide feedback to unsuccessful authors.

  The editorial team’s decision will be final.

  No correspondence will be entered into.

  Curtis would never think to open the pages of Gone with the Wind.

  The Pirate Map

  He set off in the morning but the journey had begun several days before, in Drew Saltman’s accountant’s office.

  He would need a W-7, she had explained. And once he had his ITIN then he’d need to fill out the W-8BEN, but first he’d have to obtain his certificate of residency.

  ‘Certificate of residency? Won’t my passport do?’ Drew Saltman had said.

  ‘Absolutely not. This is only for the USA IRS, remember. And you will probably have to get several certificates while you’re at it. Make it a dozen.’

  ‘I could photocopy them.’

  ‘No. They all have to be certified by the ATO.’

  It had the complexity of algebra but none of its logic. Not that algebra was his strong point. And not that he would get any sympathy from Mrs Zhang in that respect.

  ‘And don’t forget your TFN and your ABN,’ she said. ‘You do have a TFN, don’t you?’ Though it was rhetorical. It always was. She turned to her filing drawer before he could reply.

  The weight of these acronyms alone. Documents with mystifying serial numbers, as if they were motor vehicles or household appliances.

  ‘Couldn’t I just pay the withholding tax instead?’

  Mrs Zhang had looked at Drew as if he’d just confessed to bestiality.

  And then there was the time involved. He was itching to get back to his studio. It was getting cold in the mountains, and he’d already delayed stacking the load of timber for the pot-bellied stove.

  ‘Just go to the ATO. Believe me, it will be worth it in the end,’ she said.

  He took the early train from Woodford and arrived at Central Station before nine am. He could have changed trains but had already decided to walk the few blocks down. Mrs Zhang had given him a clue. A photocopy of a fax of a recent copy of the document he was expected to obtain. The top left-hand corner was partly obscured by a pre-copy fold, but in tiny lettering there was the Sydney GPO box number of the Australian Tax Office, and t
he name of a street. The number of the street was obscured, but it was an excellent start. He would simply have to walk along this street and find the right building. It would beat loitering around the GPO boxes waiting to follow the person who collected the mail back to their source. In the train he had taken out his handy wallet card ‘Contacting the ATO’ and examined it again, but there were only virtual addresses, phone numbers and website links. Contacting the ATO in person, he decided, could be an adventure. And it had been a while since he’d visited the city.

  Drew Saltman walked up and down the street, once each way, before settling on a process of elimination, but when he decided on the place it seemed obvious. There was no sign, number or nameplate, but on the footpath were smokers draped in lanyards, representing government office workers the country over. They stared at him with the skittish collective suspicion of the endangered species, undecided whether he was foe or friend, whether to tough it out as one or break ranks and bolt for cover. He paused for a microsecond, contemplating a comradely cigarette himself, although he had given up a year ago. In fact it was outside Mrs Zhang’s Emu Plains office that he had smoked his last, pushing the butt deep into the pine-chipped border garden of the little business estate on the edge of town where she had elected to work. The other tenants were a small printery, a cleaning agency, a nut roaster and packager, and several indeterminate businesses that could have been cardboard packaging or cocaine supply. When Drew had asked why here, Mrs Zhang had pointed out the obvious advantages of more space and lower overheads. Cheaper than the CBD, she had assured him. And her clients came from all over the place anyway, they didn’t need a central location.