Losing the Plot Read online

  Elizabeth Coleman is the author of four published plays, including the smash hits Secret Bridesmaids’ Business and It’s My Party (And I’ll Die If I Want To) (published by Currency Press). Her theatre writing has also appeared in several anthologies. As a screenwriter Elizabeth adapted Secret Bridesmaids’ Business into an award-winning ABC telemovie and has written for many of Australia’s most popular dramas, including Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, SeaChange and Bed of Roses, which she co-created with Jutta Goetze. Elizabeth’s prose has appeared in Dear Jack (published by Random House), New Idea, The Sun-Herald and The Newcastle Herald. Losing the Plot is her first novel.

  First published in 2019

  Copyright © Elizabeth Coleman 2019

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  ISBN 978 1 76063 343 1

  eISBN 978 1 76087 103 1

  Set by Bookhouse, Sydney

  Cover design: Christabella Designs

  Cover image: Shutterstock

  For Alan, just because

  ‘No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.’

  Eleanor Roosevelt

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Acknowledgements

  VANESSA

  The End.

  Vanessa paused and frowned at her laptop as dawn broke outside the kitchen window. Was it cheating to write the last two words first? Not according to Natalie.

  ‘It’ll help give you the confidence that you can actually finish,’ she’d said. ‘And then your novel won’t just become an abandoned displacement activity so you can avoid processing your pain.’

  Natalie was a counsellor, she knew about this kind of stuff, and her advice was proffered with a perfectly judged balance of professionalism and personal warmth. Vanessa could still picture her supportive smile and feel the gentle squeeze of her hand.

  Bitch. Whore. Husband stealer.

  But still. She’d be cutting her nose off to spite her face if she didn’t take advantage of Natalie’s expertise. Although look how that had turned out the first time.

  ‘I’m leaving you for Natalie.’ The End.

  She should have known there was something wrong when Craig suggested they talk their feelings through with a counsellor, but she was so excited when he used the words ‘talk’ and ‘feelings’ in the same sentence that she somehow missed the signals. Craig was a man of few words, who was always loath to discuss his emotions unless they related to sport. In front of the footy with his mates he’d weep with joy over a ‘screamer’ and wallow in unbridled sentimentality about players’ retirements and knee replacements, but when relationship issues came into play, it was like a door slammed shut. Vanessa sometimes wondered if putting on a pair of footy shorts and kicking a ball around the kitchen might get her more of a reaction? The thought tickled her, but she’d never do it. Mainly because she knew it was juvenile. And there was cellulite to consider too.

  But then they’d sat in Natalie’s office and something about the counsellor’s empathic gaze and toned biceps opened a floodgate, and an ocean of emotions spilled out of Craig.

  ‘I’m sorry, Ness,’ he mumbled at the end of a lengthy monologue, ‘but I need someone I can communicate with.’

  Oh.

  ‘Well, if that doesn’t take the cake!’ she wanted to yell when she could eventually think again. ‘It might have been handy to tell me this before, and then maybe I wouldn’t have wasted the past ten years respecting your need for silence.’ But instead she was silent. Shock will do that to you.

  Vanessa heard herself exhale. Eight months later, Craig’s absence was still the primary presence in the house, and right now she could feel him in every corner of the tired old kitchen. They’d been planning to renovate when they bought this 1960s bungalow in multicultural Preston in Melbourne’s north eight years ago. Grand dreams of granite benchtops and open-plan family living! All come to nothing, because Craig was too busy building other people’s houses—and maybe his heart was never really in it anyway? It was ironic that there was so much building going on all around them—in the past few years, three neighbours had sold to developers who’d promptly demolished their houses and stuck up apartment blocks. The feel of the quiet street where everyone once knew each other was changing, and Vanessa wondered who’d succumb next. At least Mrs Bianchi next door, who’d been in Australia since 1972 but still had only a rudimentary grasp of English, was clinging on.

  Daisy nudged Vanessa’s leg for a pat, and she reached under the table to scratch her beloved labradoodle’s head. Daisy met her gaze as if to say, ‘It’s okay, we’ll get through this together,’ and Vanessa’s eyes misted over. Funny how a dog can do that to you. Through the window she could hear little mynas tweeting on telegraph poles and her heart ached for the smog on their tiny lungs, but the sun was rising over the backyard and she could spot the first daffodils popping up, so that was something. Vanessa wasn’t much of a gardener but she loved daffodils. But, then, who didn’t? Spring. New beginnings.

  She turned back to her laptop. The End. That’s how it had felt when Craig left. And now here she was, on the brink of forty, which she was contemplating celebrating by sticking her head in a bucket. No, not really.

  Well, possibly.

  She regarded her rounded tummy under her dressing-gown. At size 12 she was one size smaller than the average Australian woman, so how come the clothes she bought were almost always labelled ‘large’? It was a conspiracy against womankind and she knew it, but it still made her feel like an elephant. Especially when she compared herself to Natalie, w
hose tummy was as flat and taut as a drum. Natalie was a fitness junkie. Which seemed at odds with being a relationship counsellor, but why should it? Just because she spent all day sitting in a chair listening to people complain and cry, it didn’t mean she was sedentary by nature. Far from it! Sitting was just what Natalie did when she wasn’t working out, her glossy dark ponytail swinging from side to side as she attended boot camp in the park each morning, optimising her own wellbeing so she could be there completely for her clients. With compassion in her heart and Nikes on her feet, Natalie was Craig’s dream girl. And the fact that her eyes were beady and a bit too close together was clearly an irrelevancy to him. Sitting here in front of her laptop, Vanessa couldn’t help thinking that Craig and Natalie were living a grand love affair in real life, while she would have to suffice with fiction.

  She was going to call her novel Lost and Found Heart. It would tell the tale of Georgie Sinclair, a feisty New York cardiac nurse who is assisting in a heart transplant operation when she discovers that the donor heart belongs to her fiancé, who has just been killed in a car crash. Georgie faints in the operating theatre, incurring the wrath of the arrogant but brilliant transplant surgeon, Dr Magnus Maddison. It’s the first of many clashes between them, but as the tale unfolds and Georgie’s heart heals, she and Magnus surrender to their sexual chemistry and fall deeply in love. Dr Magnus Maddison is an alpha male who intuits Georgie’s emotional needs and will never fall out of love with her. But how do you fall out of love, anyway? ‘Oops, I fell.’ Like love was a hammock. Vanessa thought that falling out of love was just an excuse for people who’d stopped trying. But Magnus would never stop trying—not that he’d need to try, because he and Georgie were perfect for one another.

  Vanessa was suddenly gripped by panic. She was a dental assistant, for goodness’ sake. For twenty-three years she’d been sterilising orthodontic pliers and ingesting humanity’s fetid breath. That might qualify her to scribble a handbook on flossing etiquette, but a romance novel? Who was she kidding? But then she rallied as her mind flew back to the 1994 Lower Plenty High School speech night, and holding her breath as she watched Mrs Flannery the English teacher waddle up to the microphone. The mic made that awful high-pitched sound and Mrs Flannery reeled back, wincing.

  But then she regrouped and announced: ‘The year ten English prize is awarded to Vanessa Spriggs.’

  Vanessa remembered her face flaming with pride and embarrassment as Mrs Flannery told the assembled parents, ‘Vanessa has done wonderful work on our English texts all year, but it’s her creative writing that shows particular promise.’

  Applause!

  Vanessa pondered the screen. Should she put a full stop after The End? She turned to a pile of medical-themed romances by her favourite author, Charlotte Lancaster, but a quick flick-through revealed that none of them ended with The End. So where did that leave Natalie’s advice to start with The End?

  Brrrrring!

  It was 6.30 am already?! Vanessa jumped to her feet in frustration and flicked off the oven alarm. All she’d written were two redundant words and she’d have to get the kids out of bed soon. Her heart lurched as she plugged in the iron and grabbed a couple of crumpled school shirts from a washing basket. Her oldest son Jackson was now nudging thirteen, and the sensitive little boy she’d adored had morphed into a smelly stranger who got up to God knows what in his bedroom—although judging by his crusty sheets, she could guess. She was just glad he didn’t share a room with his rambunctious younger brother Lachie, who’d just turned ten. Of course, it was inevitable that puberty would snatch Lachie too, but there was no need to give it a head start.

  Once again, she was struck by how sad it was that the boys no longer had their dad at home to help them navigate that stuff. How had it come to this? They said in retrospect you could see the signs but, in all honesty, she hadn’t. She’d always assumed she and Craig would live happily ever after, even when they weren’t. It had never occurred to her that she’d become a single mum with hairy ankles and a hole in her heart where her husband had been.

  Heart!

  Inspiration zapped like a thunderbolt. She had the last sentence of her book! She hurried back to the table and planted herself in front of her laptop, typing rapidly with three fingers:

  Magnus drew her into his arms. He put his hand over her heart and gently lay her hand on his own. ‘You hear that?’ he said. ‘Two hearts beating as one.’

  Vanessa sat back and beamed with pride. For the first time in eight months, she felt a flicker of optimism.

  Which meant that Natalie was right. Damn.

  Georgie handed Magnus a needle and suture thread, and she felt a shock of electricity as their hands touched through their sterile gloves. Those same manly hands that sent electricity pulsing through her fingers had just placed a new heart into the chest of her critically ill sister—

  ‘Give it back!’

  ‘Get off me!’

  ‘Mum! Lachie stole my phone!’

  Oh great, the boys were at it again. Vanessa tried to ignore the fracas coming from Lachie’s bedroom.

  ‘Tell him to give it back!’

  ‘Shut up, you loser!’

  ‘You’re the loser!’

  ‘M-u-u-u-u-m!’

  Vanessa didn’t budge, because quite frankly her bum would have to be on fire to make her leave the computer right now. Almost a year to the day since typing The End, she was tapping towards the finish line! She could scarcely believe it. Somehow she’d dragged herself out of bed at 4.30 am for three hundred and sixty-eight days in a row. She’d stuck it out through all the doubts, until the ideas had started flowing and Dr Magnus Maddison and sassy nurse Georgie Sinclair came alive and somehow made everything else make sense. It was as if creating a fictional world had helped her to see the real one more clearly.

  In hindsight, Craig wasn’t solely at fault for their marriage failure—not that anyone ever is. Vanessa could see now that she’d tried too hard not to rock the boat. She should have demanded Craig’s attention and engaged in some air-clearing argy-bargy, but conflict had always made her toes curl. She sometimes wondered if things would be different if she and Craig had been one of those couples who revelled in volatile screaming matches followed by passionate make-up sex. Maybe, but that was so not her. She was a ‘people pleaser’ through and through—although, ironically, she hadn’t pleased Craig …

  Her eyes fell on a vase of perky daffodils that she’d picked this morning. Another spring. Another new beginning. Maybe it was time to actually forgive Craig and Natalie instead of just pretending to for the boys’ sake. It had been twenty months now, and they’d all moved on. Vanessa was in love again—with Dr Magnus Maddison. Was that wrong?

  Their gazes locked above their surgical masks. Magnus’s eyes were unfathomable pools, as deep and dark as the night itself, and yet there was a vulnerability in them that she hadn’t seen before. Were they shining with the hint of a tear?

  The daffodils were vibrating in time with Vanessa’s tapping, which she chose to take as a happy omen, even though she knew it was really due to the wonky table that had a coaster under one leg to stop its wobble. Which wasn’t working.

  ‘Mum, he won’t give it back!’

  Jackson appeared in the kitchen doorway with Lachie right behind him.

  ‘Dibber-dobber!’

  Vanessa dragged her eyes away from the screen and turned to her sons. They’d both been blessed with Craig’s height and thick mop of honey-brown hair, but while Lachie also shared his broad shoulders and perpetual tan, Jackson was a skinny kid whose complexion was cut from the same freckled cloth as Vanessa’s. The genetic short straw, in her opinion.

  ‘Lachie, give it back. You should be doing your Desert Animals project, anyway.’

  But Lachie’s thumbs kept tapping away with the astonishing dexterity of a digital native.

  ‘Just let me exterminate the Ender Dragon—’

  ‘It’s my phone!’

  Vanessa
snuck a quick peek at her screen. Should she change ‘shining’ to ‘glistening’? Yes, glistening with the hint of a tear sounded better.

  Meanwhile Jackson lunged for the iPhone and Lachie lost control of his game. He thumped his brother. Jackson thumped him back, and it was a tangle of freckled arms and fists.

  ‘I was about to kill the Ender Dragon!’

  ‘It’s my phone and I want to kill a Wither!’

  ‘That’s enough!’ Vanessa whipped the phone out of Lachie’s hands. ‘There must be someone you can murder together.’ She pointed to the living room. ‘This iPhone is confiscated. I want you both on the Xbox now.’

  ‘But Mum …’

  ‘It’s not fair …’

  She raised her hand. ‘No arguments. It’s Call of Duty or bed.’

  Jackson and Lachie loped off grumpily, and Vanessa experienced a bleak moment. What kind of mother orders her sons to play a violent warfare game? The kind who thinks that if she doesn’t get some peace, she might kill them.

  She hadn’t always been so permissive. She used to fret about the boys playing violent games, but Natalie had thoughtfully assuaged her fears.

  ‘You really don’t need to worry. Young minds can differentiate between fantasy and reality, and believe it or not Xbox controllers are good for their dexterity and hand–eye coordination.’

  Of course, Vanessa could have said, ‘You know where you can stick your advice, you scum-sucking husband-stealer?’ But let’s face it, Natalie was telling her what she wanted to hear, because the Xbox kept the boys busy and freed her up to write her book. She just hoped that Lost and Found Heart would sell enough copies to pay for their therapy if they needed it later. Or their bail, maybe. Which wouldn’t be as funny as it seemed right now if it actually came to pass.

  Peace at last, she thought as machine-gun fire rang out from the living room. She attacked her keyboard with gusto:

  As Georgie watched his skilful hands sewing up the long thin wound running down her sister’s chest, she prayed with all her heart that Holly would make it through the critical postoperative period …