Evelyn wonders if it is a universal experience, rubbing your calves together because you’ve just shaved your legs, delighting in the way they slip over each other, all the while thinking about how you have once again stepped right into the absurd crooked mouth of society’s expectations of women and are probably by now rotting in its small intestine. But it’s not so bad, because your legs are all soft and you have a cup of coffee and the pretty barista smiled at you and it’s forecast to rain this afternoon.

She sits by the window in a bright new café at the centre of town. It is very white and polished and modern, and its customers are mostly on the cusp of middle age. The coffee is mediocre, but with enough syrup and foam to make up for it. Watermelon Sugar is playing for the third time this morning.

Her laptop is open in front of her to a document which is all Times New Roman and two-point spacing and a spattering of red markings. It is the manuscript of a resolutely unoriginal romance novel she is editing for a friend of a friend. The author has been at great pains to have the reader understand that our heroine is mouse-small with a pair of kaleidoscopic eyes, described so frequently and in so much detail that, Evelyn decides, they ought to become the eighth Wonder of the World. When the love interest growls for the sixth time in two and a half pages, she finally sits back with a sigh.

Out the window the streets are busy and loud and alluring. She finishes her coffee and shuts her laptop. When she steps outside the air is crisp, and she shoves her hands deeper into her pockets. The city is bright today. It’s shed the glittery, infinite feeling of last night, but mornings in the city have their own sort of thrill. 

She meanders from shop to cracked footpath to shop. She is thinking about Oxford commas and what to buy as a birthday gift to her father and the article she read recently which said that people don’t, in fact, swallow eight spiders in their sleep. 

She eventually buys a set of old Jimi Hendrix records for her father. The man at the counter puts them in a box with a maroon ribbon, and she walks the forty minutes to her apartment with it tucked under her arm.

 

Her keys rattle in the lock. It is probably twenty years old and temperamental, so this thirty seconds spent wiggling the key is a daily ritual. When the lock finally relents, Evelyn leans against the door and shuffles inside, already halfway through kicking off her shoes and letting her bag drop to the floor.

The box goes on the white console table, and she withdraws a few envelopes from the old-fashioned mailbox on the back of the door. She rifles through them as she crosses the little lounge room to the kitchen. A bank statement, a receipt from a charity she donated to some weeks ago—these she tosses on the countertop to be opened later—and a beige envelope addressed in gold cursive to Evelyn Ryde, not prefixed formally with Miss like the others. 

It is a startling thing to receive a wedding invitation when you have only been alive for twenty years and three months. More so, even, when you find that the union in question is that of two friends from high school. Worse, you haven’t spoken to either of them since graduation. And now you are left to contemplate a terrible set of ideas: firstly, that you are old enough to be invited to the weddings of old school friends; secondly, that in the case you accept the invitation, you will have to face all the people you have made no effort to contact in the past two years; and finally, that it is neatly situated inside the same week you are already going home for your father’s fiftieth birthday. The inevitable conclusions here, of course, being that you suddenly feel sickeningly adult, that you cannot possibly attend the wedding, and that you have no choice at all but to attend the wedding.

Evelyn leans back against the counter to consider these things, and the invitation in her hand. It asks for an RSVP by September 17. She has just over two weeks to respond. The wedding is in October.

 

*

 

Last night Evelyn wasn’t very sober, but she was feeling restless before she’d had a drop to drink. Restlessness was her constant companion. It was like an itch behind her ribcage which was impossible for her to reach. The itch had grown in intensity over the past several months, and now it worked its way up into her skull so that it drove her half mad.

She suspected that the itch started with her economics classes, and ended with university in general. The people weren’t the problem. Neither was the city—she loved the city—but in that moment, sitting cross-legged on her bed with Weezer playing from a speaker, she felt that if she had to sit through one more lecture in a dimly lit theatre with yellowing walls and bad acoustics, she might throw up. Possibly it was the Weezer that tipped her over the edge of reason, but it was with a rush of adrenaline that she opened her laptop to the page which had been sitting for days, untouched. Her mouse floated over the words, Discontinue my study. And then it was done, and she was flooded by a great wave of nausea.

 

“It’s not itchy anymore,” she said to Nethra. (Nethra is the sort of friend to drop everything at the first buzz of her phone, and when you explain that you have just made an uncharacteristically impulsive, life-altering, and potentially calamitous decision, bring home a bottle of pink Moscato with her.)

Nethra was sitting across from her at the kitchen table, and appeared to think on this for a moment.

“This was a good thing,” she said finally. “You seemed happy enough last year, but that was when you were fresh out of high school, and anything is better than high school. And you never liked your classes.”

“Let’s do something,” she said to Nethra, who was a good audience, because she always wanted to do something. “Let’s go to the bar with the books and the black-and-white pictures.”

It was cold, so they wore coats and insufficient sheer stockings and fell into step on the old rainy streets.

 

*

 

“I got invited to a wedding today,” Evelyn says.

She is sitting on the polished wooden floor of the kitchen she and Nethra share, one hand resting lazily on a glass of champagne. Nethra is pottering about making risotto, and Evelyn thinks that there are very few things in this world better than this combination of sparkling wine, risotto, and Nethra’s ‘40s music playing on vinyl.

“Whose?”

“People from school. The girl just turned twenty last week.”

“Damn.”

“She’s, like, this big influencer online now, and he’s going to be a human rights lawyer.”

“Those aren’t real jobs. People like that don’t actually exist.”

Evelyn laughs. “She’s making a lot of money, anyway. I think he’s mostly buried in HECS debt, but it all sounds very glamorous.”

“And here we are, in a tiny little apartment, doing nothing with ourselves but working and paying the rent and eating risotto.”

This is a poor representation of Nethra’s situation: two of her paintings were recently selected to feature in a student exhibition hosted by the State Gallery, and she is a strong candidate for their curatorial internship this year. Nethra wouldn’t say as much, but a classmate she brought to the apartment one evening to work on a group project assured Evelyn that it is so. Evelyn, on the other hand, is degreeless and dubiously employed.

“What am I supposed to do with myself? Freelance editing and copywriting isn’t a career. At some point I’ll want stability.”

“You could turn it into a career.”

Evelyn slumps back against a cupboard. She can smell the mushrooms in the risotto. The sun is about to set, and it hits the framed watercolour of the Seine which hangs above the wall connected to the kitchen counter. She and Nethra found it at one of the little op shops in town a few months ago. The light has made a rainbow on the glass.

“Start with the party and the wedding,” Nethra says. “Maybe a change of scene will be good for you. Run away to the country to breathe the clean air and decide what you want to do from there.”

Evelyn smiles. The country is actually a small city nearby several other small cities, but Nethra is right. Evelyn finds she often is.

“All right,” she says, “but don’t be surprised when I call you from an asylum. Being confined to the company of my family and a pair of conjugal children may very well send me mad.”

“They’re not children.”

“They might as well be.”

“They’re both adults.”

“Hardly!”

“You’ll have a great time. Listen, you remember Charlie from film studies last semester?”

People are saying that Charlie Davies is a genius. They wrote a couple of stories for an anthology last year, and a semi-famous poet called them ‘one of the first great voices of the young generation.’ Evelyn read the stories, and she thinks the poet might not be too far from the truth. Charlie was a fourth year catching up on a second-year course. In class they spoke slowly, deliberately, words falling like beads down string. In some people this would have been irritating, bordering on vain, but there was a quality of wry self-deprecation about Charlie which somehow proved their authority to speak. Apparently, they got some big publishing deal with HarperCollins last year.

“Well, they’ve got a book coming out in a week,” Nethra continues. “A novel, I think. The launch party is at the Harry Hartog’s in the city tomorrow night. Will and I are going.”

Evelyn says she’ll go, too, and gets up off the floor to start on the dishes. (She is shockingly prone to accidentally starting small fires, and the last time she and Nethra cooked together the rice tasted like soot. She swore up and down that it never happened when she was on her own, but after that Nethra wouldn’t let Evelyn help with the food, and Evelyn was tasked with the cleaning up.)

 

*

 

Evelyn finds that the longer she looks into the mirror, the more unlike herself the figure seems. Something about the mouth. The forehead is a little too wide. The eyes in particular are too dark, and she can’t understand the expression in them. She has the feeling of being observed, and to avoid the reflection’s gaze she puts on some mascara. A short inward conflict over red lipstick or brown, and then her key is in the lock and she is descending the dingy artificially lit stairwell which makes her think of horror movies. 

It takes twenty minutes by light rail and five on foot to get to the wide, brightly lit Harry Hartog building. She can see movement behind the displays in the windows, and the sounds of music and laughter reach her even as she stands out on the street.

Inside, it is warm and loud and there are posters of the book’s cover hung around the room. The bookshelves have been rearranged to clear a space for the event. To her right is a table with copies of the book for sale. At the back there is a low platform and a small jazz band, which Evelyn distantly registers as a little extravagant. There are maybe sixty guests, all in shifting clusters. A particularly large group holds Charlie Davies, and on closer inspection, Nethra and Will.

She takes a glass of pink wine from a table beside the door which boasts an array, and seeks out her friends.

“Evelyn!” says Nethra, immediately relieving her of the wine, “Charlie, you remember Evelyn from last semester?”

Evelyn says hi, congratulates them.

“Thanks,” says Charlie. “It’s good to see you again, Evelyn. How is the editing going?”

Evelyn forgot she’d mentioned it. “Good, I think. Mostly indie authors—James Harrison sent me a manuscript last week. He wrote Vignettes last year. It won a few awards locally.”

Charlie hums their recognition. Someone asks if they are working on anything new. Charlie laughs and says they’re always working on something new, and that doesn’t mean it will ever see the light of day.

“But,” they say, “my agent wants to rep any future books I write, and the people at HarperCollins are already talking about a sequel.”

Will compliments the jazz band, but with a hint of a smile. (Will is Nethra’s boyfriend, who is very tall and extremely liable to make jokes at inopportune moments.)

“Oh, God, I know,” says Charlie, looking sheepish. “It wasn’t my idea. This is all funded by Harper”—Evelyn takes this to mean HarperCollins—“and they insisted. It’s a bit pretentious, having a whole live band for a little book launch.”

Several voices at once rush to assure them that there is nothing pretentious about it. Will says that a little pretentiousness elevates any occasion, and that he personally enjoys being pretentious as often as possible.

Evelyn excuses herself to go to the bathroom. On her way out she catches the eye of the pianist, who suddenly strikes her as familiar. He smiles, and she recalls him from her high school stage band. (She played the clarinet in stage band until year eleven. These were dark times, but she is recovering.) His name is Spencer, she remembers, and he used to be in the year below her at school. Stage band was unpopular with the students, and Spencer and Evelyn were among those recruited by the desperate music teacher’s pleas—alongside two loyal alumni and several of the teaching staff. She eventually managed to escape under the pretence of having to focus on schoolwork in her final year, which wasn’t entirely untrue and therefore didn’t weigh too heavily on her conscience. Mr. Anderson (the music teacher) insisted that she was welcome to come and practice with them whenever she had the time, that she was one of the best musicians he had. She wasn’t—in fact she was decidedly average—but he was so enthusiastic that she thanked him and played at the end-of-year awards night. 

The jazz band is in the middle of a lively rendition of Ain’t We Got Fun and her friends seem to have moved on to another group out of her immediate sight, so she goes to the food table. The food table is, of course, the best way to avoid familiar faces which one has an obligation to speak to without hovering, awkward and alone, in some empty corner.

The food is literary-themed and cheesy (the sentimental kind, not the dairy kind), which she enjoys. ‘Hamlet and tomato’ sandwiches, ‘Sherlock scones,’ ‘pide and prejudice,’ ‘tequila mockingbird’ cocktails, ‘war and peas’ pies heaped (naturally) with mashed peas, and little square cakes with eat me written on them in icing.

She takes a cocktail and is about to look for Nethra and Will, but the former is already walking towards her.

“Thanks for the wine,” says Nethra.

“One of these days I might have a whole glass to myself.”

“What are you drinking?”

“Don’t even think about it.”

“Just a sip?”

“Get your own.”

“I don’t want my own. I have the wine. I want a sip of yours.”

They go on in this way for some time, which culminates in Nethra sharing the cocktail and Evelyn scowling so determinedly that Nethra says she will give herself premature wrinkles. The band finishes their set, and Spencer comes towards them. Evelyn is glad for Nethra: her presence takes some of the pressure off conversation, and Evelyn always feels an irrational need to prove to people from home that she has friends.

“Hey, Evelyn,” says Spencer. “Long time, no see.”

She asks him how he is, what he is doing this year. He says he is travelling with the band, playing at events. Just around the country at the moment, but they hope to take it international.

“This is Nethra,” says Evelyn. “Nethra, Spencer. We were at school together.”

He asks how she and Nethra know each other.

“We were neighbours in college last year. I haven’t been able to shake her since. We’re roomies now,” says Nethra.

“And what are you doing with yourself, Evelyn? I heard you were coming here for university.”

“Well, I’m afraid you’ve caught me in a bit of a life crisis.”

“Oh?”

“She just dropped out,” Nethra supplies. “But I was sick of hearing how much she hated all her classes, so it was for the better.”

Spencer laughs and asks if she is doing anything in the meantime. Evelyn says she’s taking on more work.

And what does she do for work?

She edits manuscripts and does a bit of copywriting. Freelance stuff.

What does she write?

Brochures and radio ads for local businesses, mostly. Sometimes people with signatures at the ends of their emails ask her to write social media posts about ticketed events—experiences, that sort of thing. Shows. Art exhibitions, a few times.

And does she write anything else? Fiction?

Oh, no, she is a critic, not an artist. She doesn’t have a creative bone in her body. Does he see people from home often?

Yes, when there aren’t any gigs he lives with his parents. He is still close with his school friends; most of them stayed in town after graduation. The other day he saw Dr. Zimmermann in the freezer aisle at Coles and was too scared to call him by his first name. (As soon as Dr. Zimmermann got his PHD in education he wouldn’t respond to anything but ‘doctor.’ This was a great source of amusement for the students, who found him equal parts endearing and insufferable. Dr. Zimmerman was short, grumpy, and sarcastic, but was generally well-liked in spite of it all.)

Evelyn laughs, and Nethra says to talk about something she understands. Evelyn says something about slim pickings and Will approaches with two copies of Charlie’s book. He slings an arm over Nethra’s shoulders.

“They weren’t kidding about Charlie being some kind of prodigy,” says Will. “Listen to this.”

He reads a paragraph from the first page, and there is a churning in Evelyn’s gut because it is gorgeous, gorgeous, and Charlie is a genius and Charlie is only twenty-two.

When Will is finished Spencer applauds lightly. “Well read. Do you all know the author?”

“A little,” says Evelyn. “Me and Nethra had a class with them.”

“I didn’t until today,” says Will, “but they seem like the sort of person one ought to befriend. Just in case you ever need someone famous around.”

Evelyn thinks that Will is right—Charlie will be famous, one day.

Around nine, Charlie reads from the book. Evelyn plucks one of the eat me cakes from their tray. She takes a bite, and she is very aware of her limbs. Charlie is spilling beautiful words they are too young to have written and suddenly the way she is sitting feels posed, and she is growing taller and taller and she sticks out, heavy and awkward and fumbling. Then it’s over, and when Nethra says in her ear above the soft applause, “Amazing, wasn’t it?,” Evelyn has nothing to say, can only nod and think about how the nail polish on her left thumb is chipped. 

She considers buying a copy of the book on her way out, and doesn’t. Nethra, Will, and Spencer are waiting outside, talking. Spencer exchanges numbers with the three of them, and they promise to catch up soon.

“By the way, Evelyn,” Spencer says before the group splits up, “you’ll be going to Jess and Bailey’s wedding next month, won’t you? I heard they’re inviting most of your class. I’m only invited because my mum was on the PTA with Bailey’s mum.”

“I think so.”

“Great. I’ll see you there, then.”

They say goodbye, and Will drives Nethra and Evelyn home. On the drive all Nethra can talk about is how meeting Spencer was a sign that Evelyn has to go to the wedding, how could she abandon him friendless, et cetera. Evelyn watches the cars going past and the buildings reaching tirelessly to embrace the starless black sky. 

 

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