Page 25 of The Wedding Forecast

‘Taking some good shots?’ I ask.

‘I haven’t started yet,’ he says. ‘Just getting a feel for the room.’

‘Oh, what does that entail?’ I smile and toss my hair a little. If I can’t get this pleasant, age-appropriate Patrick who has been served up to me by the universe on a silver platter to like me, then I have no hope for my future.

‘Just checking the lighting, mostly, but also getting a sense of the energy and personality of everyone.’

‘What have you sensed so far?’

‘A very nice group of people,’ he says, smiling.

Is he flirting? I don’t think he’s flirting. I don’t think I’m doing a great job at flirting either. I can see Joel just a couple of metres away, and it’s very off-putting. I can’t flirt when Joel is in my eyeline. I turn and angle myself in a different direction, and now I can see Mac. He glances over at me and lifts an eyebrow slightly. I look away quickly.

I chat with Patrick—he’s been photographing events for five years, he co-owns the business with Drew, he moved here from Brisbane. I’m determinedly collecting facts as if the mums will be quizzing me later—and then he excuses himself to get the cameras ready, and Bobbi walks over to me. She’s wearing chunky black-rimmed glasses, big gold earrings and her signature red lipstick. Her dark curly hair is springing in every direction. I wish I could channel her glamorous energy.

‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask you about Patrick,’ she says.

‘Thank you,’ I say.

‘I’m here to ask about the next book,’ she says, and now I wish she wanted to talk about Patrick. ‘How’s it going?’

Bobbi and I have always bonded over books. Hayley was a big reader when she was young, but she stopped as a teenager and never really went back, which broke Bobbi’s heart. My mum is a reader, but in a casual way. Bobbi guided my reading from a young age, and she knew exactly when to give me certain books. Now is the time for Melina Marchetta, then you’re ready for an Austen, and now for du Maurier, now for Octavia Butler. She put The Artist’s Way into my hands when I was twenty-two, starting my first full-time job and panicking that my life was not going to have any room for creativity. When I was struggling with my writing in my mid-twenties, she gave me Big Magic and Bird by Bird. After the Joel breakup, she said poetry was the only thing I should read for the first few weeks, and then I needed to move from that to dark crime and then memoir, and she was right.

Bobbi’s bookshop is my happy place. It has been ever since she bought it when Hayley and I were teenagers. I have done my homework sitting in her tiny stockroom, read whole books curled up on the velvet chair she has in the corner for customers, met my favourite author who came to sign copies, discovered whole new worlds browsing her shelves. Mum might be my ultimate cheerleader and obsessive seller of my books, but Bobbi is the one who is most invested in my writing career in the artistic sense.

‘It’s coming along really well,’ I say to her.

It is not coming along well at all, but I am keeping that mostly to myself. Everyone says to try to write your second book before the first one comes out, so you can write free of pressure and expectations. I had planned to follow this advice and have a finished first draft by now. And I also thought, with a touch of writerly delusion, it might even be a good first draft, that I might figure things out more quickly with my second book.

This has not happened.

I do not have a first draft. Or a draft zero. I have an ‘ideas’ document, that contains random sentences and bits of dialogue and half-written scenes and notes to myself like ‘Research bank fraud!!’ and ‘Is there magic in this book??’ and ‘Look up how long cats are pregnant for’, waiting for my mind to piece it all together like a puzzle. Waiting for the lightbulb moment when I will finally think, ohhhh this is what it’s been about all along, how obvious. What a hook, what a twist, what a high-concept and yet nuanced idea, how wonderful that it can be perfectly pitched in one simple sentence and will practically write itself from here on in.

I have spent a lot of time googling ‘second book syndrome’ and nodding along when I read essays and think pieces and listen to authors on podcasts talking about how hard it was to write their second book. And then I have spent a lot of time imagining myself saying this while doing press for my bestselling, award-winning second book, and people being amazed I found it difficult because the book is so seamless. I am visualising myself at the end. I am manifesting. That’s an important step, according to lots of podcasts.

‘What’s it about?’ Bobbi asks. She hasn’t asked me this before. Normally, she’s very aware of not putting that pressure on authors. She must sense I am lying.

‘I’m not really in a place where I can say exactly yet. There’s a lot of directions it could still go in.’ This, at least, is true. I have a whole Word document of different directions.

‘Mmmm. Okay. Have you read Lily King’s Writers and Lovers?’

‘Yes. Last year. I loved it.’

‘Read it again. And Helen Garner’s diaries. Oh and George Saunder’s A Swim in the Pond in the Rain.’ She’s worried. This is how Bobbi fusses over me. She starts rapid-fire book recommendations.

Hayley dings her glass at that moment and tells everyone to take a seat at the table, and we move to sit down, the parents naturally congregating at one end and the rest of us at the other. I sit down quickly, so that Joel and Bianca are left with the decision of how far away from or close to me to sit. Bianca still looks very pale, and she’s taking tiny sips of that glass of Coke. I’m not sure I’ve heard her say a single word yet.

Mac sits down next to me. Joel, who was hesitating, looks relieved and takes a seat on the side of Mac. Hayley and Luke sit across from us, with Luke’s sisters and their husbands near them, and further down, my parents placed strategically between Bobbi and Hayley’s father, Gary, and his wife. I can see Hayley scanning the table, making sure everyone that needs to be separated is separated.

Patrick was taking photos as everyone milled around having drinks, and now we’re seated, he is getting pictures of people sitting together.

‘How are things going with Patrick?’ Mac asks, as we start our entrees.

‘I wouldn’t say they are going at all. Yet.’

‘I saw the two of you talking.’

‘For about five seconds.’