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1.

2024. Bellevue Hill. Circling the block at sunset, fence-lines hung with flowers, brighter orange than the ones I remembered. I’m on the fifth floor, she’d written. Top of a rise. Way down in the backyard there’s a sea of nasturtiums and two rotary clotheslines. Down a side street, there is an apartment window, high up. A light is on. This might be the place. The apartment Helen Garner used to live in, the one she bought to be a writing studio in How to End a Story after Murray Bail—V in her diaries—tells her renting is money down the drain. As I walk, I triangulate. Most buildings have four floors, no fifth. There are a few other details: My outlook is tremendous. One way the ocean, the other a tiny sparkly strip of harbour. The apartment above me would not have that kind of view. I need to go up higher, somewhere I can see in all directions. City to sea, and in the middle, the dark organ of the golf course, gently breathing.

2.

‘It’s about compression,’ K says. ‘About your brain getting all squished.’ We are at a pub on a sticky Thursday night. My friend works, and makes art on the weekends. She thinks that when you work a city job, in an office, something happens to your mind. You have to make it efficient, able to churn through information and produce whatever you produce: marketing newsletters, content plans. The point is, there is no incentive for your brain to expand. In fact, the opposite: the more compact, the better. ‘Compression,’ I say. ‘Compression,’ she says. ‘That’s the killer.’ On the train home, I watch a video of a garbage compactor driving over a huge heap of waste. It doesn’t look like it is doing anything. Then the camera zooms in on the roller, which has spikes, like one of those massagers. Slowly, I see how the garbage appears to deflate, re-shaped. Dense.

3.

2020. Stanmore. I  call Jobseeker my ‘artist grant’. Every two weeks, it lands in my account: $1198.07. Mutual obligations suspended. My housemates still have jobs, and their jobs both require them to actually keep working. While they sit with laptops at the kitchen table, I remain in my room. I also have work to do. All day, every day, I sit at my desk, pushed into the damp wall of my room. Empty cups leave brown stains, a series of circles over the table’s surface. Whenever a plane passes overhead, the windows rattle so violently it seems they will break. A Post-it note above my desk says Persevere. So I do. My sentences lead me nowhere. I keep writing them.

4.

2023. I get work as a copywriter for a branding agency. Sometimes I stand by the window, which is high above the city, so far above everything the view seems unreal, like  a video on a loop. For a year, I write nothing outside of my job. I move into my boyfriend’s apartment in Bellevue Hill.

One night, I wake around 2am and the dark is suffocating. Unable to return to sleep, I sit in the living room. The only light comes from my phone. There are the notes, the ones that were meant to be my novel. I am anxious my writing will be inflected by the branding copy, by the fluorescent lighting, by the YSL Libre that sinks down over the hallways, leaves meeting rooms steeped in lavender. Work would mean the kind of sentences I could produce in my ‘free’ time would be clear and efficient. But they would be defective. Unable to do that thing the best sentences do, fluent in languages of the psychic, of the subterranean, opening up the worlds that run always under this one. I see my brain as a cube: compacted, dense. I message a friend: How do I do this? My friend writes back: The conditions under which art is produced rarely have anything to do with the art that is actually made.

5.

2022. Helen Garner writes a submission letter to the inquiry for a new National Cultural Policy. Other authors do too. She writes about how funding meant weeks and months of time, time she once used to wander around. She said that though these activities look like bludging, they are in fact a sort of labour. There is less arts funding now, and even less for literature. Garner writes, Without the help I was given, my work would have been hasty and shallow, and my working life harder and more painfully fragmented. In my journal, I write down more painfully fragmented. I go back to her diaries, read about the apartment, the tremendous view, the blue sofa from David Jones. From my bed, I can touch the desk. When my housemate, H, leans on one of the damp walls, her hand goes through.

6.

2020. A Tuesday morning. I use the dropper to measure exactly the dosage, 10ug. Even diluted, the LSD tastes metallic. Then I sit on the edge of my bed, facing the window, which faces a wall. For a moment, I think that I think the wall is moving, that the tincture is having a hallucinogenic effect. But it’s just a cloud moving overhead: something I’d have perceived with or without the drugs. Nothing else happens. Nor two days later, when I double the dose. What did you expect? my friend texts. It’s sub-perceptual. I think of that Great Gatsby cover art, ‘Celestial Eyes’. The way the blue implies dissolution, a person who has become sky. I read that Fitzgerald loved the cover so much he wrote it into the story, describing Daisy as the ‘girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs’. That’s what I had been looking for. That kind of expansiveness.

7.

‘Writers need day jobs,’ says S, a poet friend who has a day job. We are at Sappho’s, waiting for other poets to read their poems. Around us are younger writers, mainly university students hoping to become poets themselves, whatever that means. I ask S if these students would need jobs even if money were no object, and he replies, ‘Absolutely.’ Without that kind of tether, they get too abstract. Their writing becomes dissociated from the material conditions of reality, and in its dissociation, meaningless. I wonder about happens when I am not writing, when the job that pays my bills becomes my only one. My brain, I think, will get dense—will become so compact, extremely efficient. (And my other ‘job’? To be a writer—would my brain have to expand? And even if I had the money, and so had the time, would it be capable?) At a different reading, a novelist says he has a grant for his next book, enough to cut his day job hours by half. ‘But,’ he says, ‘I don’t know. There’s no grant for, like, cleaners. What makes my “labour” so special it should be taxpayer-funded?’

8.

2024. Before work, at 5am, I make watery coffee to drink at my desk. There is an amber-coloured hourglass I place by my laptop. I like the weight of it, the way sand runs so serenely through its neck. Each morning, I have two hours—or six turns. Later, as the train rushes into the tunnel, into the dark beneath the city, I repeat lines to myself, trying to hold it all in my head as I get some version into my phone notes, which I will transfer to a document, and then, finally, when it feels ready, into the real document. There are hundreds of notes in my phone. Some of them whole paragraphs; some just a word, misspelled. Some no longer make sense by the time I transfer them to the working draft. They are hasty and shallow. And I can tell when a text I read has been made in this way, as a series of notes, fragments composed on trains or in breaks. You can feel it. In the internet novels, the Carver-pilled fiction, the fragmented ‘experimental’ essays. Like Gatsby, I think, if he snorted Ritalin recreationally. Hasty, shallow.

Around me on the train, people are in suits, blue-striped ties. Neat dresses nipped at the waist. Gel nails on screens. They all work at Baine, at BCG, at EY. A writer, I can’t remember who, once tweeted, I could work at Baine, but no one at Baine could write this essay. I think I could work at Baine. I text a friend who works in consulting. Do you think I could work at Baine? When I get to my desk, next to a glass window overlooking the dark green tree-tops of Hyde Park, I write an email draft which is really an essay paragraph. ‘2024. Bellevue Hill. Circling the block at sunset.’ My friend texts back: Actually, it’s Bain.

9.

2020. My artist grant keeps coming in. At the end of every day, I sit in the ‘garden’ with my housemates and drink. ‘We have fun,’ H says. ‘We pass the time,’ J replies. One night, J asks after my novel. I say it ‘all feels very theoretical’. He and H exchange a look. ‘But, like, you are writing it?’ I nod, then stop, become unsure. ‘Has your agent read it?’ It had been a month since I heard from my agent. In my room, alone, I see from their website that they no longer work at the agency. There are no emails from any of them. No one has told me anything. My body goes cold, almost burning, the way air rushes over a wound. The whole next day, I sit in my room and stare at the pages. Am I upset? I search my heart and stomach, waiting for them to betray some buried feeling. There is no distress, not even that much hurt. Mostly, I am relieved. The stack of paper fits nicely enough into the portable fire pit, the one intended for parties and barbecues. The flame starts slow, takes ages to catch. The pages have a strangely synthetic smell. I write in my journal: Smoke. Extremely black. A plane cuts through the sky above, tail behind it like a filament, parallel lines that catch the orange light and burn and break down.

10.

2024. On an otherwise normal Thursday, the email comes. Meeting request, no agenda. I already know. They are downsizing. The economy. My last day will be in two weeks. That night I go through all my phone notes and make my calculations. I tell myself it will not be like it was last time. This time, it will work. And then I am circling the block, counting the floors of apartment buildings. There is the hill, and when I get to the top, I can see the lights from the golf course coming on along their string. I know the ocean is in one direction, the harbour in the other. Six floors, meaning there must be a fifth. This must be the place.

Out the front, there is a real-estate sign. SOLD. For a two-bed apartment, not Garner’s, but maybe below it. One bathroom, no car spot, 64m2. When I look it up later, I see that it went for $730,000. Grinning, I see the other apartment lights and imagine—what? Some other life. Some other reality running silently underneath this one. My own life, for a moment, doubled. When I close my eyes, I can see it: the spring morning pours into the room, bathing it in purity, the weeks and months, can see myself at the desk, every hour of every day, poring over hundreds of fragments, holding each up to the light in turn, its sharp edge glistening, and seeing in it something deep, something unbroken, whole as the sky.