Page 101 of The Wedding Forecast

‘No. I did, for a long time, but now I don’t. And it’s not just that we broke up. I don’t think he ever made me feel how the love of my life should make me feel. And anyway, the psychic told me the love of my life was Patrick. So either way, I’m screwed.’

We always talk during my night and Mac’s morning, because it works best for our schedules. And it’s always talking. Not video calls. Messages and phone calls. Words and voices. He says he’s becoming a morning person for me.

‘Should we record our conversations and make it a podcast?’ I say to him. ‘A writer and an actor discuss movies and life. The hook is you’re famous.’

‘I am not famous,’ he says.

‘You’re as famous as people I see making stuff and calling themselves famous.’

‘You saw my apartment. I’ll show you my bank account and you’ll see I’m not famous,’ he says.

‘Fame isn’t about money.’

‘Then what’s it about?’

‘Power? Attention?’

‘I think it’s mostly about money.’

‘Do you want to be famous?’

‘Fuck no.’

‘You must. A bit. You’ve tasted fame.’

‘And it tastes bad.’

‘Oh, come on. When people are lining up, after the show, to see you. That feels good.’

‘That feels good, yeah, but that feels like a reward for the work, for the performance. Not for being famous. I love the work.’

He’ll always choose his work, I hear Luke saying.

‘What do you love most about it?’ I ask.

‘I don’t know. All of it. No, that’s a lazy answer. I love. Hmmm. Sometimes you’ll be working and working on finding a character, and you’ll do the smallest thing, a head tilt, a movement, say one line a certain way, and you’ll just know: oh that’s it, I’ve got it, they’re here, I’ve found them. That moment of discovery. That’s what I love most,’ he says.

‘What do you love most about writing?’ he adds.

‘The same thing. That moment.’

32

I HAVE TAKEN on the bookshop’s social media and website, and it’s more fun than I could have imagined. I can post things without having to run copy through Compliance and Legal and getting sign off from ten people. The freedom! Bobbi gives me all the log ins and says, go wild. She’s never been very interested in anything online. But, as it turns out, she’s very good on screen. She loves walking around her shop and making book-recommendation videos, as long as she doesn’t have to film it, edit it, post it, caption it or be involved in any other part of the process—the parts I love. Bobbi starts to get an immediate following for her book chat but also her fashion. People are always asking where her big, bright earrings are from in the comments (Bobbi has a formidable earrings collection). She loves the attention and I love creating it, and who knows if it’s actually impacting sales but it’s definitely getting us more followers. And it’s fun.

I also post pictures of the typewriter reviews, which people love, and one day a young woman comes into the shop and says, ‘I just had to see those cute little write-ups in person’, and Bobbi and I exchange a look of delight. We then sell her three great romcoms.

I spend time updating the shop’s website, simplifying it, and writing copy, and I find myself doing it on my days off, just because I enjoy it. I don’t hate marketing, I am starting to think, I just need to be marketing something I love. I also have plenty of free time on my hands to do this, because I’m still waiting on Samantha to get back to me about The Scam. I’m in the scary void between handing in a manuscript and getting the edit back.

A woman comes into the shop one day wanting to buy a book for her son. He’d just graduated uni and was moving out, she said, and he needed a beginner’s cookbook. The way her face lit up when she spoke about her son, how proud she was that he was moving out, even though it was only one suburb away from her, it made me think of Mac. It made me wonder what his mother had said about him to strangers when he’d gone off to America on his own at twenty-one.

‘Tell me about your mum,’ I say to Mac that night.

‘What do you want to know?’

‘What was she like?’

‘Well. She liked to make things special. She made a big deal of birthdays, she loved Christmas, she decorated for Halloween way before that was a thing in Australia. She would make our Friday-night movies into a whole production—she’d write on a little blackboard in the morning the name of the movie she’d be putting on, and what time, and the snacks available, like our house was a little cinema.’