Page 50 of You Can't Hurt Me

18

Nate invites me back the next morning to work on some of the final chapters. By now they are almost complete but his attention to detail is obsessional, and he doesn’t like me working on the memoir alone.

“You know ghostwriters don’t usually hang out this much with their interviewee, don’t you?” said Amira as we passed each other in the hall this morning. “You’re going way beyond the call of duty.”

It seems I don’t have much choice. When I arrive at Algos House that morning, Jade stands in the doorway, giving me a baleful stare as if I’m an unwelcome inconvenience.

“Oh, didn’t Nate let you know? He rushed out to a meeting and won’t be back till after lunch, I’m afraid.”

“Really?” I ask. “How odd. But we arranged it yesterday.”

I check my phone and, sure enough, a text from him flashes up.

Sorry I’m not at home. Unexpected meeting, but you can work at the house and I’ll be back by 2. Nate

“It hardly seems worth going back,” I say. “He’s suggested I stay here and work in his study. That wouldn’t be a problem, would it?”

“I guess it’s fine,” she says a little doubtfully. “If he says so, come in. I’m making soup, if you’d like some?”

Her tone is slightly less arctic, and I follow her into the kitchen area where there’s a sweet, savory aroma of butternut squash and shallots. She places an extra bowl on the marble island between us. There is a plate of crusty white bread, iced water poured into pale blue stemless glasses. She sits down opposite me, waiting for her bowl to cool down.

“So. How’s the book coming along?”

“All good. Nate’s really enjoying it, I think.”

“He’s really okay about it all?” She tilts her head.

“It all?” I repeat.

“I know there have been some...reservations.”

I dip my bread into the soup, let it coat the crust. When I look up again, she is watching me.

“I think he’s enjoying the whole process actually. He’s letting go a bit and it’s all been quite...therapeutic.” I smile at her, and she looks puzzled rather than pleased. “Sometimes it helps to talk about the past, don’t you think?”

“Maybe to an actual therapist, but—”

“But not a journalist,” I complete her reply, watch as she lifts the soup to her mouth, sipping in quick birdlike movements. She puts down her spoon.

“It’s a whole different thing, isn’t it? One is designed to be helpful, and the other, I guess...”

“You have a problem with journalism,” I say, as kindly as I can. “I can understand that. All those reporters hanging around here after Eva died, the stuff they wrote. Insensitive, untrue. It must have been so difficult for all of you. It’s just we’re not all, I’m not—”

“It’s not the journalism, it’s the memoir that some of us have trouble dealing with.”

“Us? Who else?”

She sighs, smooths her hair behind her ears. “It’s not a personal thing. I guess I’m just allergic to this current obsession. Confessional journalism, memoir, whatever you want to call it. Putting it all out there on display, self-cannibalizing.” She almost spits the word out.

“I think Nate is a very willing self-cannibalizer. It’s exactly what he’s signed up to.”

It must be a superpower, I think, Nate’s ability to inspire devotion like this. Priya is another disciple too, those glances during the interview, a chemistry that hums below the surface. Priya and Jade alter imperceptibly when he’s around, something stirs in them. I recognize it in them, a hunger for his approval.

Yet, I realize in that moment, sitting at the table across from her daughter, that it’s Kath I really admire. She exerts her own power. But Priya told me soon after I got the job that talking to Kath for the memoir was off-limits. Why?

Nate has told me how close Eva and her sister were; only seventeen months between the two of them and Kath had always looked out for her. Kath’s home was apparently covered in her art. Eva had also been Jade’s much-adored godmother as well as her aunt. I think of her often, the newspaper picture of her after the inquest, looking haunted but grimly determined. Fighting for her little sister with a burning passion that someone should pay the price for her untimely death. I’m no stranger to that. Siblings who’ve become so fiercely loyal and protective that it can be a little extreme at times.

“So what worries you about the memoir?” I ask. “The fact that Nate’s doing one at all or that I’m ghostwriting it?”

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