Page 3 of Love Is…?

“Hold on,” Juliet laughed. “I have very little detail. Apparently, the family is quite private but well-known. I was contacted by a Tom Campbell who is an assistant to the mother. He’d like to meet you at nine tomorrow morning. I’ll text you the suburb and street.”

“That soon? That’s all the info? Just the street?” Tessa’s eyebrows rose. It felt slightly clandestine. “What’s my role?”

“Hold on. If you’re successful at your interview, then Tom said he’d explain the role to you right after it. Apparently, he’smaking his decision immediately. Anyway, Tom will text you a description of the house tomorrow morning about eight o’clock.”

Juliet rang off, and Tessa’s phone buzzed with the text containing a street in Lanbrook, the wealthiest, most discreet suburb in Melbourne.

“Okay. There’s that.” Tessa unstuck her finger from her ear, and the noise of the crowds assaulted her eardrum. She stared at the polished concrete floor and whispered a silent thank you to the Parkers, then shook her head. Nine tomorrow. A street in Lanbrook. No other details. Great. It was going to be difficult to pass an interview if she didn’t know what exactly she was interviewing for.

Chapter

Two

The concrete pathbetween the front door of Jayde Ferguson’s little one-bedroom flat at the back of her dad’s house was short—a couple of metres—and mostly undercover. Luckily. Because it was bucketing down. She dashed through her father’s back door, and stood in the laundry, shaking her head so that her long hair swung about, much like an Afghan Hound, then reached for a towel from the pile that was permanently stationed on the top shelf above the washing machine.

Twisting her hair into a towel turban, Jayde walked into the kitchen that was cuddled up to the dining area, which was rubbing shoulders with the lounge so that all of it was basically one room. Her father was hunched over a notebook at the table.

“Hey, Dad.” Jayde pressed her palm against the kettle, and, finding it barely warm, clicked the button to boil the water for a cup of tea.

Her father, Oliver Ferguson, looked up and beamed. “Hello, Jayde love. Did you miss your old dad today?”

Jayde laughed. “Probably not. I’ve got pay TV, social media, the Inte—” She gave him a mock glare. “Of course I missed you. I miss you every day, Dad. This is why I’m here. To see you andhave a cup of tea. It’s miserable out there, and I could do with the company.”

The kettle clicked off, and the steam billowed from the spout, the condensation coating the glass of the cabinet doors above. She made her tea, and sat opposite him, pulling the towel off her head and dropping it in a bundle at the edge of the counter.

“Having an off day?” Her father wrinkled his brow in concern.

“No. Just…” Jayde’s shoulders sagged. “I’m making money. Well, enough money to contribute here, but I wish I had that one big break. Not for the money, but for my writing. For my heart. I know I’ve been saying that for years, but I’ve got all these amazing ideas.” She sipped her drink. “Articles. Big projects. Books I want to write and have published. I can’t seem to get that break to make that happen, no matter how hard I try. It’s publish this article, get paid, publish that article, get paid.”

“Didn’t that big one last year open more doors for you? That one about the Metro funding and the rorting that was going on with the local council?” Her father pushed his notebook away.

“Yes. Yes, it did. That investigation took a year, and I really sunk my teeth into it, and the paper paid me well. Most of my pitches have been accepted since.” Jayde hummed under her breath. The life of a freelance journalist was not easy. Most of the time her work entailed writing articles, pitching new articles, editing articles, following up on invoices that newspaper and magazine finance departments seemed to lose. All of that at once. No time for what she really loved to do, which was writing long-form essays. The kind that featured in theNew YorkerorCultureor, closer to home, theSydney Herald Weekendmagazine. The sort of profile piece that readers bookmarked to reread later when they could indulge. The sort of profile piece that readers could delve into, and discover how the person beingprofiled navigated their lives. It was immersive journalism at its best, and Jayde wanted it.

Meanwhile, she was writing solid, well-received articles about dodgy councillors, and the Department of Transport cutting down ancient trees in the middle of the night to make way for the new highway to the airport.

She shook off her weird malaise, and pointed to the notebook. “Written some new stuff?”

Her father scooped up the book, and flipped it open, his dark brown eyes twinkling. “Yes!” He cleared his throat dramatically. “It takes guts to be an organ donor.” He stared at Jayde, his eyebrows raised.

Jayde couldn’t help letting out a groan. “That’s a shocker.”

“Excellent.”

Her father was writing what he called the ultimate book of dad jokes. Bad dad jokes. It was a passion or an obsession depending on which perspective you took. Just yesterday morning, he’d bustled into the room—well, what constituted a bustle for a man with a walking stick; it was more a joyful hobble—and announced, “I have found the title of my book!”

Jayde had paused, her triangle of peanut butter toast halfway to her mouth. “That’s great. What is it?”

“It’s called ‘The Ultimate Compendium of Dad Jokes For Those Who Are Currently Dads or Will Be Dads or For Those Who Are Not Dads But Recognise The Vital Importance That This Sub-Genre of Humour Has In Our Society’.” He tossed his hand sideways as if to say, “What do you think?”

“Really?”

He nodded enthusiastically. “Absolutely. My thinking is that people will have to pick up the book to read the title and because the title’s so long, it will wrap around to the back, and because the blurb is on the back, they’ll be forced to read it, and then bam! You’ve got ‘em.”

Jayde blinked, then laughed. “That’s actually brilliant.”

Her father made his way over to his cymbal and snare drum, and picked up the drumstick. He delivered the famousba-dum-tsspercussive sting that chased the space left by the punchline of a good joke-or a bad one, in her father’s case. He’d bought the musical instruments last year because he said that the joke leaked out of his head if he didn’t have a soundtrack.

Jayde understood the logic. Writing prompts and ideas appeared in her brain at the strangest times, and if she didn’t have her phone, or notepaper, or the back of envelopes handy, then the idea ran away. She once wrote out an entire paragraph for an article about graffiti at the Melbourne Art Gallery on a tampon box she’d ripped open to access the blank cardboard inside.

---