by Emily Paull
‘Thank you,’ I say, cautiously. ‘I’d better go. Your 9 am will be here any second.’
I sigh, not looking forward to phoning these clients. Whenever this happens, it is always my fault. There are six people I need to call—which means six clients who are probably going to yell at me. The first is a new client, so I have the paperwork ready, mounted on a green Perspex clipboard, with the contact details filled in. I reach for it, hoping for a mobile number. I only half-read the name. Then something makes me look again.
Oliver, Jessica.
Could it be?
My body processes this information like it’s a toffee that is too hard to chew. I have the office phone in my hand. Slowly, I place it back in the cradle.
She arrives at nine-fifteen, the little bell above the door startling her so that she ducks as she comes into the waiting room. She laughs, embarrassed, and pushes her tiny John Lennon sunglasses up on top of her head. Those teeth. An orthodontist could have made a packet on them if her parents had bothered to try. Today, she is wearing a blue and white sundress with a blazer over the top. The outfit makes her look skinny, malnourished. She is gangly. Ungainly.
‘I’m so sorry, I’m running a bit late,’ she says, reaching for the clipboard and pen before I can stop her.
I have mere seconds to decide what I am going to do. I just want to meet her. Talk to her one on one.
I go through with her into the dentist’s office and get her settled in the reclining seat. Then I get an idea. I hand her the glasses, turning on the overhead lamp, so she has to squint at me.
‘How long has it been since your last check-up?’ I ask, hitting the space bar on the computer a few times and pretending to type.
She laughs. ‘Oh, um … a few years.’
‘Hmm,’ I say, enjoying the way she seems cowed by my disapproval. ‘Open wide.’
She does, and I lean over her, tapping at her teeth with the instruments, scraping a little here and there. I’ve been a hygienist for long enough that I know what I am looking for. Despite how crooked they are, her teeth seem to be in good shape.
‘Would you say you eat a lot of sugary foods?’ I ask.
She shrugs and accidentally closes her mouth around the metal tool I have in there.
‘Ouch, sorry. Um, yeah, I guess. While I’m working, I tend to have some lollies nearby. I drink a lot of Coke too.’
I pull out the instrument and place it on the table next to me.
‘Us dentists are not really huge fans of Coke, you know. That’s probably a habit you should train yourself out of, if you can.’
‘I know.’
‘What do you do for work?’
I hold my breath, wondering what she will say. Will she too have a writer-slash-something that pulls out at moments like these? Or has she moved on to the next tier? Has Jessie Oliver, in fact, quit her day job?
‘I’m working on a novel,’ she says.
When I glance at her, I see her eyes are damp beneath the glasses. This is not unusual—I have seen adults cry in this dentist’s chair a hundred times before. But today, I suspect, the tears are more than just her nerves at the thought of having a drill in her mouth.
‘Oh?’
‘It’s my second, actually. My first did really well—totally took me by surprise. It got longlisted for a couple of awards, and now everyone wants to know what I am writing next and … well, I’m not, really. I’m sitting around watching Netflix. And eating too much sugar.’
I try to think of something that Dr Delaney might say in this situation, but it’s difficult. A dentist is not a therapist. A dentist is not someone you would expect to give you comfort.
‘I’m sure you’ll be back on track soon,’ I say. ‘In the meantime, no more Coke.’
She takes a deep breath and sniffs. I see her shaking off tears under her glasses.
‘Your teeth look healthy,’ I say. ‘I’m a bit short-handed today, so I’m going to do your clean and scale myself, all right?’ It is not a situation conducive to conversation, but somehow she manages. While I have my instruments inside her cheeks, polishing her teeth, flossing, applying fluoride gel, she talks away, syncopating her sentences in the gaps when I pull my tools out for more polish, or ask her to sit up and rinse. I try not to engage her, but nothing seems to work.
Finally, it occurs to me that Jessie has been trapped alone in her office with her characters for so long that she’s taken to divulging her life story to anyone she comes across. I want to feel sorry for her, but then I remember that she’s Jessie Oliver, and I have to hide a smirk.
She’s a total phoney. She’s getting so much attention. How can she have such low self-esteem?
* * *
I wrote my first novel because of the cats. In fact, for a while, it was called The Cats. Original, I know.
For a time, my ex-husband David and I lived on a quiet cul-de-sac in South Fremantle, and our neighbours had a lot of cats. Tabby cats, the occasional black, and one that was humongous and white, which had the misfortune of being named Snowball. We had a cat too—a tortoiseshell cat, named Shanti, whom we kept inside. But the cats on our street were positively feral. At night, the cats would be allowed to roam free through the garden beds along the street, wantonly pissing and marking their territories wher-ever they wanted. I doubted any of them had been desexed. Perhaps it was a Fremantle thing. If you’ve been there, you know that it’s a suburb full of free spirits, university students and young families, and that on Sunday evenings, the sea breeze smells faintly of salt and marijuana.
It had been a particularly warm spring, and there was an entire October where I found myself waking each morning at around three, to the sound of cats hissing and spitting at each other. David somehow managed to sleep through this, but I couldn’t. I kept a bucket of water by the window in our bedroom, and when the cats started up each morning, I would wait patiently until the balls of agitated fur were in sight, open the window and aim the contents of the bucket. Splash. That soon moved them on.
One night, the sound of the water emptying from the bucket woke David up.
‘Peggy,’ he said. ‘Leave the bloody cats alone. It’s cruel.’
‘What’s cruel is allowing them to be out all night. Don’t these people know that domesticated cats kill the native animals? It’s illegal.’
‘Come back to bed. Please, love.’
I could not come back to bed. I was awake. My brain was scheming with ideas, and I was up anyway, so I went down to the second bedroom. I was writing a novel about a woman returning home to the small town where she was born, after a serial killer has murdered her childhood friend.
I wrote every night for a year, and when the novel was done, I printed it out, stuffed it into yellow envelopes and mailed it to every publisher I could think of.
One by one, the yellow envelopes returned. Some had not been opened. Others had a letter enclosed, saying briefly, Thanks, but no thanks. The ones that were never returned were worse still.
About a year after I’d first begun sending out the manuscript, David and I were having breakfast in our backyard. It had been another restless night. Despite the fact that I was sending the manuscript out, I was still up most nights, tweaking, rewriting scenes and then changing them back. My constant trips back and forth between the study and the kettle had kept David awake, and he was half-asleep in his marmalade toast. I poured him a cup of coffee out of the plunger, handing him the mug by way of apology.
Poor David, he didn’t realise how much work it was being married to a writer. He risked getting his head bitten off every time he ventured into the study, so conscious was I of not being brought out of the ‘fictive dream’. The night before, he’d offered to make me a cup of tea before he headed to bed, and I’d told him to fuck off. I’d apologised right after, but the look of shock on his face was priceless. It would have been funny if his feelings hadn’t been so hurt.
David sighed and reached for the pile of unopened mail on the table, flickin
g through it absently. A Dymocks catalogue caught my eye, and I snatched it up. Their Book of the Month was on the front, a bright blue book with a picture of a golden church spire on the cover. The Old Familiar Places.
Intrigued, I read the blurb.
‘What the fuck is this?’ I said, under my breath.
‘Sorry?’
‘This.’ I threw the pamphlet down in front of him. ‘This is my book. Or close to it. It’s the same idea.’
He read it slowly. The wait was excruciating. I nibbled at my thumbnail, tasting a bitter metallic tang from something on my hands.
‘I guess it’s kind of the same …’ he said, unsure.
It was then that I knew for certain that he had not been reading the pages of my novel that I’d printed for him. I hadn’t really expected him to. The most David ever read was the sports pages, and only during AFL season. Looking back now, I am surprised we stayed married for as long as we did.
‘It’s identical,’ I said, tears rushing to my eyes as I pushed back the chair hard enough to scratch the floor. ‘No-one is ever going to publish me now.’
He couldn’t even stir himself to follow me from the room, so I powered up my computer and made myself delete every folder my novel had been saved in. Who knows what David did, probably turned on the television.
A month later, we had another big fight, and David thought it was as good an excuse as any to pack his clothes into a bag and leave.
* * *
Alone in the house, there is no-one to temper my moods. No-one to tell me I am obsessing when I spend the hours I used to spend writing looking at Jessie Oliver’s book tour dates, or creating a fake profile on Facebook so that I can send a friend request to her personal page. I spend half a day reading through her tweets, laughing at how inane she sounds.
‘Just dropping in to some of my favourite Perth book-shops to sign some stock, hashtag blessed,’ I read out loud to Shanti, making my voice sound as girlish and insubstantial as Jessie’s.
Is this the life of a prize-winning author? Signing books and talking at libraries and endlessly tweeting about nothing? For each tweet she has labelled #amwriting, I wonder how many words she has written of her new book. Then I think back to our conversation in the dentist’s chair. The tears that worked their way out of her eyes under the glasses. The world must think she is writing, but I know the truth.
David comes by to collect more of his stuff, and I am trawling through her Facebook photos, deep diving into things she has posted years ago, before anyone even knew who she was.
‘Who’s that?’ he asks, looking over my shoulder.
‘The woman who stole my life,’ I say.
He considers his answer for a moment, then takes a step back before he speaks.
‘Just don’t do anything … you know … crazy.’
It is David I am thinking of as I push open the gate to Jessie Oliver’s house. Consumed by guilt, I have decided that I must come clean about posing as her dentist, and find her address in her file. The gate creaks a little as I let myself through, and I jump.
She lives in one of the suburbs along the highway, near a busy secondary school and a wetland reserve. A curious amalgam of industrial and natural landscapes, depending on which direction you’re looking.
Her place is in desperate need of landscaping. The lawn is dead and dry, and crunches under my sandshoes. The front door is open, the flyscreen banging in the wind. I ring the doorbell, but its batteries are nearly dead, and it sounds like a gramophone in need of a wind.
‘Hello?’ I call out.
Through the flyscreen, I see her come out from the back, wiping her hands on a tea towel.
‘Dr Delaney. Um … hi? What are you doing here?’
I shift my weight from side to side, wondering if she too feels like she is looking into a mirror. I’ve done my hair the way she does, brushing the longer bits of my fringe forward and to the left. It was just something I tried this morning when I stepped out of the shower, but seeing her now, I realise where I got the idea.
She is wearing a cute little apron, embroidered with flowers. I wish I had an apron like that. It occurs to me that she’s so nice, so obliging, that if I asked her for it, she might just give it to me.
I take a deep breath, and the inside of my mouth tastes like vomit. ‘I need to speak to you about something.’
She throws the tea towel over her shoulder and opens the flyscreen, stepping aside to let me pass. ‘Let’s go through to the sitting room, then. It’s the first right.’
My footsteps echo on the threadbare hall carpet. The sitting room is barely bigger than a wardrobe, barely big enough for the floral couch she’s pushed in there. She has no television, only a bookcase with two rows of paperbacks on every shelf, and her coffee table is littered with handwritten pages.
The words are on the tip of my tongue. I am not Dr Delaney. But I don’t speak. I stare at the pages. Is it just me, or is her handwriting like mine as well? I know it instinctively. It’s like I’ve written those pages, though I haven’t written anything in months.
She speaks, to fill the silence. ‘I’ve worked out where I know you from.’
I turn, startled. ‘Oh?’
‘Yeah. You were in the audience when I spoke at the writers festival earlier this year.’ I swallow, smoothing back my hair with my hands. ‘Oh. Was I? I hardly remember—I’ve been so busy.’
She smiles. ‘No, I remember. You were listening intently the whole time, and every time I felt nervous, I looked to you. So, thanks, I guess.’
‘No problem,’ I mutter.
She gestures at the couch, and I take a seat, rubbing my hands on my jeans and wiping the sweat that’s started to form on my palms.‘Would you like a drink? I know it’s only four, but I’ve just opened a bottle of wine.’
‘No,’ I say. ‘No, thank you. I shouldn’t be drinking, really. And I can’t stay long.’
Jessie Oliver looks disappointed. Does she think that we are friends? How sad she is, to believe her dentist wants to be her friend, that she isn’t merely being tolerated.
I suddenly feel stifled, in this room where she has been working, surrounded by all her words. A copy of The Old Familiar Places sticks out from the bookcase, where it looks like she has tried to cram it in.
My jaw tightens. I have to go, I have to do what I have come here for, and go.
‘Jessie,’ I say. ‘I think it’s best if you don’t come back to the clinic.’
She wrinkles her nose in confusion. ‘Why?’
The answer which comes to me is both truth and lie. ‘My dental hygienist is an aspiring writer, and she’s developed somewhat of an infatuation with you. I think perhaps it’s best for both of you if I don’t continue to see you.’
Her face has gone pale. ‘An infatuation, like how?’
I steel my face. ‘Well, she’s very, very jealous. She keeps telling me that you’re completely untalented and that your book is woefully overwritten. She keeps saying over and over how false you are when you give talks, how you believe you’re smarter and wiser than you really are.’
I sneak a glance at her face, to see if any of this has hit home. She is completely silent.
I continue, ‘Thank goodness she was off sick the day you came in, or I don’t know what she would have done. She’s not had a good run of things, you see. Her husband left her. She’s trying to get her novel published, but it’s really not good. It’s never going to happen. She really needs more help than I can give her. But I shouldn’t gossip.’
Jessie’s hands are shaking. She slips them into her pocket.
‘And your teeth,’ I finish. ‘She will not stop going on about how odd-looking they are. I’m very sorry, really, but it’s best if you stay away.’
She nods. She is not crying, but I sense that she won’t until I’ve gone, so I stand up.
‘The poor woman,’ she says, finally. ‘It sounds like she’s had a very hard time of it all.’
‘Yes,’ I say.
‘Well, nobody is perfect.’
I pick up my handbag, cradle her shaking hand as I pass. Her skin is as cold as ice.
‘It’s strange,’ she says.
Her voice is so quiet, I’m uncertain as to whether or not I am supposed to have heard her.
‘What is?’
‘The book I’m writing … it’s about … well, it’s about a woman who is a receptionist at a psychologist’s office who becomes obsessed with one of the patients. She stalks them.’
I freeze, my handbag hoisted halfway up my arm. ‘The book you’ve been writing for a while?’
She nods. ‘It’s a thriller. A cat-and-mouse game. The receptionist, whose point of view we see it all from … you’re supposed to think that she will kill the woman, but now I’m wondering if right at the end, their roles should reverse.’
When I look into Jessie Oliver’s bug eyes, there is a glimpse of something there, something that she turns away to hide.
NOTES ON PREVIOUS PUBLICATIONS
‘A Moveable Farce’ was published in We’ll Stand in That Place and Other Stories (Margaret River Press, 2019), edited by Michelle Cahill.
‘From Under the Ground’ was published in Westerly 63.2 (2018).
A version of ‘Miss Lovegrove’ was published in Joiner Bay and Other Stories (Margaret River Press, 2017), edited by Ellen van Neerven. It was also shortlisted for the 2015 John Marsden & Hachette Australia Prize for Young Writers.
‘Sister Madly Deeply’ was published in Westerly 62.1 (2017).
‘The Sea Also Waits’ was published in Shibboleth and Other Stories (Margaret River Press, 2016), edited by Laurie Steed.
A version of ‘A Thousand Words’ was published in [RE] Sisters: Stories of Rebel Girls, Revolution, Empowerment and Escape (For Books’ Sake, 2016).
A version of ‘Dora’ was Highly Commended in the 2016 Hadow/Stuart Award, administered by the Fellowship of Australian Writers WA.
A version of ‘Pretending’ won the 2009 Katharine Susannah Prichard Short Fiction Competition (Youth).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS