Work in Progress by Paul Thomas

Author:Paul Thomas [Paul Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781869798628
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand
Published: 2011-11-23T05:00:00+00:00

This is how it unravelled:

I’d made a courtesy call to my publisher’s New Zealand arm. Another of their overseas authors had pulled out of a writers’ festival in Christchurch at the last minute so they arranged for me to take his place. I didn’t mention this to Christine; I thought it would only complicate things. I actually told her I was heading straight back to Sydney.

Kate had been badgering me to let her see my work in progress. I’d fobbed her off, not wanting to admit that I’d spent a year writing pornography and not having come up with a credible cover story. My absence was too great a temptation and her rummage through my computer files turned up the manuscripts of four pornographic novels as opposed to the budding masterpiece she was expecting. Her subsequent search unearthed the porn that Walter had provided for research purposes and the cheque book and bank statements relating to my secret contingency fund, which contained $9613.

At this point, when I was already in reasonably deep shit, things took a serious turn for the worse.

I hadn’t bothered to inform Christine that I was married. Doubtless all you amateur psychologists will have an explanation for this; all I can say is that by the time it seemed pertinent, it was already too late. As I found out in the debrief, Chas had given Emma the impression that while there was a woman in my life, it was all pretty loose. And I was, after all, a bohemian.

Christine had mentioned that she had friends in Sydney but I hadn’t attached any significance to it. Most Kiwis do.

Christine had a pile of air points. On a whim she decided to visit her friends in Sydney. She persuaded Emma to extract my phone number from Chas’s address book.

I was still in Christchurch when Christine rang our apartment. She got Kate instead. By this stage Kate’s opinion of me as a husband and all-round human being was undergoing radical revision. Showing a deviousness I didn’t know she possessed, Kate pretended to be my sister, thereby extracting further damaging information.

Kate said she was meeting me for a drink that evening, why didn’t Christine join us? They connected at the pub, Kate saying I was running late. She got a couple of drinks into Christine and probed for the smoking gun. Not content with the bare facts, as damning as they were, Christine flexed the imagination that had got her into the creative writing course and transformed a brief spark into a towering inferno.

Kate revealed herself. Christine fled weeping into the night. By the time I arrived home twenty-four hours later, Kate had changed the locks.

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