41.

I don’t sleep much that night because I worry what would’ve happened if I forgot something meaningful. Like how to write? Or how to edit. Given I have no recourse, I wouldn’t be able to do anything else. Obviously, it didn’t happen, and I can cover that friendship with Peta. It doesn’t look like I’ve lost anything I need with her, and I can rebuild the working relationship, but I can’t shrug off the threat of something that seemed so whimsical meaning something more.

Come the morning, I struggle to haul myself out of bed, and am just eating a bowl of bran for breakfast when my phone rings – I think it’ll be Lana, because who else really calls me? But it’s Gillian.

“You okay?’ she says after we exchange hellos.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” I say.

“Just checking after last night,” Gillian says. “Thought you had a panic attack or something the way you disappeared.”

Gillian knows I have a history of mental health shit, but doesn’t know just how insidious it’s been – I’ve never gone into details with her. Everybody goes into details nowadays, wearing these things as brands that not only personify them, but market them. I don’t hide it, but people only need to know what they need to know.

“You there?” she asks.

“Yeah,” I say. “Felt nauseous. Thought I was gonna throw up.” The lie’s easy. When you’ve covered for a lifetime of anxiety symptoms, lying is natural. “Think it was something I ate.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Thanks for asking.”

We talk a bit more, showing optimism about what we covered last night – although meetings like last night’s have occurred before. When we have made stuff, it’s been a synchronicity of everybody working together, but that seems harder to coordinate now. I have to drive this.

With that in mind, when I leave for the day, I reframe my thinking from I’m going to work into I’m going to the place that pays my bills and, What I really want to be doing is making a film. It’s only the smallest shift in perspective but, right now, it fuels me.

I won’t overbore you with the day’s occurrences – Cameron and I exchange a few emoji-laden emails, I have a few other edits that I try to get through, and I watch Shia stare at her computer screen (no doubt the Melody edit), frowning, like the text has transformed into a foreign language.

It’s hitting her, I hope – this deluge of shit. She’s starting to see through it. I went through a similar rite of passage. It takes a while to identify good writing, but once you do, everything you once thought was brilliant melts into drivel.

About mid-afternoon, I see Autumn come to her office door and look at me, as if she’s going to ask me to go for a walk, but like an absolute cunt (because that’s how I feel) I just turn my attention back to my computer and Cameron’s revisions. It’s wrong. It’s shit. And it’s weak. But I don’t know how to navigate it otherwise.

After work, Lana calls me as I’m driving home, all bubbly and rambling about her girls night – they’re going to some place called the Umbrella Club, which is a bar/restaurant-type thingy. I won’t bore you with the conversation – by now you should have the dynamic down, suffice to say that when we’re done, Lana doesn’t suggest coming over if they finish early.

When I get home I relish the nothing that I have to do, although I should be writing, or focusing on our film project Rain of Shadows, but instead I lay on my bed and am just happy that I have the freedom to just do nothing – well, outside of masturbate, but that’s surely a common relaxant.

During the evening, I watch a movie (Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which is the sort of movie that makes me wish I was making movies, instead of masturbating) and do my submitting thing, although I figure I should kick this habit. But this is what writing is: submitting.

I go to bed too late, wake too early, stay in bed and drift in and out of sleep, and am finally roused when my phone rings.

Lana.

“Hey,” I say.

“Hi,” she says, so bright this morning. “You still asleep?”

“I’m still in bed.”

“Still? I didn’t get home until one last night, and I’ve already done my shopping.”

I check my phone – it’s 9.46.

“What did you get up to last night?” she asks.

“Nothing. Stayed at home. Submitted some of my stuff around. Watched a movie.”

Then she blissfully unloads the night she had, that she caught up with her old school friends, that Stacey’s second marriage is in trouble, Pamela’s struggling with her first marriage because her stepkid’s unruly (although that’s because the mother’s a bitch), that Candace and her husband are doing well with negative-gearing investment and now Lana’s considering it … and on she goes, naming another four or five friends, then talking about how great the liver she ordered was and how we should go there some night because she’s really like me to see it. I agree noncommittally. People are always raving about restaurants, but most of them aren’t doing anything that special.

“Then there were these guys who bought us drinks and we got to chatting all night,” Lana finishes off.

Jealousy stirs through me as I drag myself out of bed.

“What guys?” I ask.

“Some guys doing a guys night,” Lana says. “One of them – I was talking to him quite a bit – is a software engineer. Do you know how much they make? He was saying one-hundred-and-twenty thousand. I said to him if that’s the case the drinks should be on him. He laughed and bought me a champagne cocktail, then told me he’s designing this app called BLIP – you hook up to friends, and it tells you where they are, although he says that’s the way he’s marketing it, but he’s really thinking it’ll be aimed at parents who want to know where the kids are.”

I put the kettle on, feeling uneasy.

“We talked for what must’ve been an hour – he was so nice.” Lana laughs. “But then at the end of the night when we were going, he asked me for my phone number. Me. Like I think he must’ve been ten years younger than me, but he told me he was coming out of a divorce and was getting out and about again.”

“So,” I say, slowly, “did you give him your phone number?”

“Actually, that’s funny, because I wasn’t sure how to handle it—”

“What do you mean how to handle it? You say no.”

“He was just being friendly because he was struggling after his divorce.”

“He was trying to pick you up,” I say.

“No!” Lana says, the protest so overdone. “He was just being friendly.”

“That’s what guys do when they try to pick women up. They’re friendly.”

“It wasn’t like that.”

“Of course it was like that – they buy you drinks, he buys you another one, he unloads his whole history on you and tells you how much he makes, he was obviously trying to pick you up.”

“It was just a conversation,” Lana says.

The kettle starts whistling. I switch it off and pour the hot water in a cup.

“Did you tell him you were involved?” I ask.

“That didn’t come up.”

I slam dunk a teabag into my cup, then open the fridge too violently.

“It was an innocent conversation,” Lana says.

“I’m a guy,” I say. “There are so few innocent conversations. When a guy’s talking to a woman in a social setting it’s with a view to picking them up.”

“That’s not the case at all. They were just guys socialising.”

“Any of your friends get asked for their phone numbers?”

“I didn’t ask—”

“But you did.”

“It was just two people talking. He brought up his divorce, so I told him about my divorce and how it was like starting over in a way, but I had all this other stuff to think about like Noah and finances and—”

“So you told him your divorce, you told him about Noah, but nothing about me.”

“It wasn’t like that.”

“Of course it’s like that!”

“So you’re saying if I’m talking to my boss then he’s trying to pick me up?”

“I said before in a social setting. You’re in a bar. They’re shouting you drinks. He asked for your phone number. How is that an equal comparison to talking to your fucking boss?”

“You’re overreacting. There was nothing in it like that.”

“Then why did he ask for your number?”

“Because he was lonely and wanted somebody he could talk to who’d gone through divorce—?”

“Are you fucking kidding me? Are you that fucking oblivious? So he just wanted your number to chat about what it’s like to come out of a divorce.”

“You don’t understand. You weren’t there.”

I will point out that this isn’t the first time this has happened – other situations haven’t advanced as far as this one seems to, but guys have hit on Lana, and she’s claimed it wasn’t sexual or romantic. One time, we were at a bar and did get talking to a group at the next table, which included a couple of sailors. She ended up talking to a sailor for half an hour. When we were going to leave, the sailor told me he wanted to fuck her. She pleaded ignorance.

“I think you like this,” I say.

“Like what?”

“The attention. The flirting. Getting me jealous.”

“You’re totally out of line. It was just an innocent conversation.”

“At what point would you have told him you had a partner?”

“If it got to that, I would’ve told him!”

“When? When he has his dick in your mouth?”

Lana makes a sound of disgust. “There’s no need to be crude.”

“Right.”

“If he made an advance like—”

“He did by asking for your phone number!”

“It wasn’t like that! You just don’t know because of who you are.”

So here we go – because of my background and all the mental health stuff, it’s all about how I don’t have the vast range of experience to draw upon that she does, although she was married almost straight out of high school, so it’s not like she has some extensive CV either.

I’ll fast-forward, because for the next fifteen minutes – even after I hear Lana’s parked somewhere, and is staying in her car to continue this argument – we retread all the same arguments, but just from different angles. Neither of us budge. Maybe I am overly jealous and paranoid, but she’s sanctimonious.

“I give up,” I say, and not for the first time. “This is just fucking pointless. You will just not concede even the slightest possibility that he was trying to pick you up.”

“What does it matter?” Lana says – screeches. “If it got to that, then I would’ve shut him down.”

“You really just are a cunt,” I say, and I shouldn’t, and I feel guilty and remorseful immediately, but I have worked myself up where I have nothing left – no patience, no indulgence, and certainly no logic.

“Okay, right,” Lana says, “there you go. You know what your problem is? It’s like you told me: you’re broken. You can’t possibly understand these things. Your mind doesn’t work like normal people’s. If things don’t fit into the way you think they should be, then you get upset like this. You’re broken—”

I hang up.

You be the judge.

I’m beyond for this shit.

Done.

42.

Lana sends me a message, but I’ll only repost a bit of it:

You just don’t make any sense.

And then there’s a long, long, loooong spiel meticulously detailing my inadequacies, criticizing me for my behaviours (namely inattention), and condemning me for being who I am.

In the past, I would’ve answered each point, and we would send essays back and forth. Eventually, I worked out we argued that way because it was the only way either of us could be heard. Otherwise, it was shouting – screeching – at one another, which retrospectively was insane.

But it seemed normal at the time.

And what comes to me now is simple.

I don’t want to make any sense.