I am one step closer to realising my secret, secret, secret and long-delayed goal.
Chapter Three
My secret goal
My secret goal has its own soundtrack.
Drum-roll please.
Are you ready, chorus?
Chorus (to the tune of ‘Paperback Writer’): Oo oo. She wants to be a famous scriptwriter. Scriptwriter.
Yes, that’s right. I am a closet scriptwriter.
Chorus: Oo oo, scriptwriter.
But it is not the Academy Awards that beckon, it is soap opera.
Oo oo – soap opera?
You got a problem with that, chorus?
I don’t suppose many people remember Dynasty. While I missed its heyday – it last screened in 1991, the year I turned one – my dear Aunt Patsy gave me a box set for my twelfth birthday. She thought I could use some glamour in my life. While mud was plentiful, glamour was in short supply on our commune in the hills.
‘Happy birthday, Summer.’ She placed a gold-wrapped present with a shiny bow on our rough wood table. ‘Enjoy.’ Her scarlet lips drew up into a naughty smile. ‘You’ll have to watch them at my place.’ She glanced at my mother. ‘We’ve moved out of the stone age there.’
Aunt Patsy lived in a neat brick house in Lismore. It was close to my high school and I got into the habit of visiting her after school. It was a novelty to sit on a leather couch in a house with walls that weren’t made of mud-bricks.
From the moment I slipped the first video into Aunt Patsy’s player, Dynasty filled a gap I hadn’t known was there. I inhaled the sheer glory of the settings, the dresses, the beautiful women, the dashingly handsome men, the intrigue, the bizarre but excruciatingly addictive plot lines …
The first wife, Alexis, returns!
The illegitimate half-sister departs!
The husband leaves his wife for another man!
The hotel is set on fire by the amnesiac wife!
The wife has a torrid affair with a business rival!
There’s never been a soap opera to touch it. I’d pull on my mud-stained boots in the morning imagining they were stiletto heels and arrange my daggy sunhat as if it was a milliner’s creation.
‘What are you walking like that for, Summer Dawn?’ Marley would yell as I flounced down our weed-infested path to the school bus. Only Marley called me Summer Dawn. It was a joke, but it stuck.
‘Call me Sophia, darling,’ I would murmur, languorously.
‘Wait for me, you vixen,’ he’d call after me.
Marley. I gaze out the train window. For the last few days the sun has been reddish – a light haze of smoke blankets the sky. The firefighters will be out in force.
Only Marley knew about my secret career goal.
‘Go for it, Summer Dawn,’ he said. ‘It’s what you were born for.’
If I was born to be a scriptwriter, my twin brother Marley was born to be a firefighter. His number is there on my phone. I touch my finger to it. They say we’re in for a hot, dry summer – a treacherous summer. ‘Stay safe out there,’ I murmur. ‘Don’t forget to look up.’ Falling trees are more dangerous than flames, Marley always said.
Marley never got what I saw in Dynasty but he was happy to take part in my role plays. Under duress, he would be Blake to my Alexis but he preferred being the gunman at the royal wedding. The Moldavian Massacre was one of the great moments of Dynasty. Dead bodies were strewn like confetti in this season finale. Viewers had to wait six months to find out if their favourite characters had escaped unharmed. What a cliff-hanger! What suspense! I can only hope to emulate this amazing scene one day.
I don’t suppose Marley would understand what I see in project management. Or Adrian. He wouldn’t like my apartment or my new life. He wouldn’t understand why I need certainty. Why I plan everything now. Why I live in the city. Why I refuse to come home. I guess there are a lot of things Marley wouldn’t understand about the way I am now. But there’s nothing I can do about that.
Before I went overseas, Marley gave me his tattered old copy of Jules Verne’s An Antarctic Mystery, the one Mum had given him on his tenth birthday. ‘Leave it behind somewhere when you finish it,’ he said. He’d got a new version of the complete works of Jules Verne so he didn’t need it anymore.
An Antarctic Mystery was Marley’s favourite book. When we were kids we used to sit on a log out the front of our house and he’d read from it. I can still hear him:
Great flocks of royal and other penguins people these islets.
These stupid birds, in their yellow and white feathers, with their heads thrown back and their wings like the sleeves of a monastic habit, look, at a distance, like monks in single file …
When it was Marley’s turn to control our games, we would get in a tree and pretend we were on a ship, making our way through a sea of towering icebergs. Sometimes he’d make me be a penguin, while he was an Antarctic explorer. Marley didn’t know that while he was visualising icebergs, in my mind I was in front of a roaring fire in the Carrington family mansion.
I glance at Marley’s number again then put my phone away as the train pulls into Town Hall station.
Despite what people may think, project management and soap opera are not poles apart. While soap opera is designed to give the appearance of surprise and unpredictability, in fact nothing is more tightly controlled. That is how I know soap opera is my destiny.
Adrian doesn’t have much time for soap opera. I know this because he sprung me watching Dynasty once when he came back from a run unexpectedly.
‘What are you doing, Summer?’ He sounded horribly disappointed. ‘I thought you were going to do yoga while I was away, not fritter away your time on rubbish.’
I flicked the remote, changing stations. ‘I was watching Philosophy Now, it had an excellent interview with Peter Singer, but there was an ad break, and I didn’t want to waste my time so I …’ I hit the off button before it became clear there was nothing on the box but trash.
Adrian thinks soap operas and the people who write them are an unnecessary evil. But we’re so compatible in other ways I’m sure he’ll come around if I introduce him to it in the right way. Once I’m an ace project manager and Bikram yogi in a red bikini, the fact I want to write soap opera won’t matter as much.
I know soap operas are not high art – that doesn’t matter to me at all. There is something about the love triangles, the family feuds, the bitter business rivals and the dark secrets, that reaches out and grabs me. I love how whenever the action flags, you throw in a brain tumour, a long-lost son, or an evil blackmailer. I even love the way the characters talk to each other in a way no real person ever would – how whole
