Melt. Lisa Walker

I couldn’t read it from where I sat.

      He looked up. I was struck by how indecently healthy he was. The whites of his eyes seemed freshly bleached, his cheeks had a slight blush of pink, his brown hair was lustrous, thick and neatly cut. He was like a horse spruced up for a show. A handsome and well-toned horse. ‘Where would we be without Gantt, huh?’ he said.

      I sighed. I wasn’t feeling good. The drugs and alcohol had drained out of my system and I wasn’t too sure if he was speaking English. I felt a pang of loss for Owl. He would have known better than to talk to me this morning. He would have known exactly what I needed. And he wouldn’t have looked so dauntingly energetic while he was about it either. ‘Gant?’ I murmured in a discouraging way.

      ‘Henry Gantt, the father of project planning.’ Adrian’s eyes lit up. ‘Gantt revolutionised project management.’ He could have been spruik­ing a new deodorant – stay fresher longer, no white marks … ‘A project without a project plan is like’ – he paused – ‘travelling to a strange land without a map, a guidebook or an itinerary.’

      ‘Oh.’ That confirmed it – I was seated next to an alien. I’d never met anyone who planned things before, especially travel.

      My friends all listened to their inner voices and went with the flow. They thought the universe would provide and all we ever have is now. The people I knew didn’t have itineraries. We shunned guidebooks in search of real experiences, often ending up in out of the way places without any evident attractions. ‘So much better’, we said to each other. ‘No tourists’. Except for us, obviously.

      Adrian was still talking about the contributions Gantt had made to scientific management through ‘taskeddling’ (it was some weeks before I realised he was saying ‘task scheduling’). Adrian, it was clear, worshipped Gantt, whoever he was. If Gantt did a world tour, I bet Adrian would camp out to get tickets.

      ‘Project management,’ Adrian said, ‘is the art of ascending the cone of certainty.’

      He seemed to think I was captivated. As a matter of fact I was, but not in the way he thought. It was an insight into a strange culture, like watching a reality TV show. And it was distracting me from my exist­ential crisis.

      ‘When you start a project, there is so much you don’t know.’ He held his hands out wide. ‘And then, as you work your way in’ – he brought his fingers to a point – ‘you have it – perfect certainty.’

      Perfect certainty. As he said that, the sun poked through the clouds outside the plane. A ray of light came through the little window and illuminated him.

      Adrian’s fingers were still steepled together. Almost like he was praying.

      ‘What do you call that point?’ I gestured at his fingers.

      His teeth flashed in the sun. ‘The Point of Complete Certainty.’

      I felt it then, Marley – a shiver of possibility. Could this man have something I needed?

      Adrian says if you take care of the little things, the big ones will take care of themselves. Turns out I’d been tackling things the wrong way around my whole life.

      Clicking on the email, I press ‘send’.

      I stretch as I look out the train window, remembering the first time I heard of The Point of Complete Certainty. What bliss, to know exactly where you were going, exactly what you were doing. I never would have conceived of such a possibility without Adrian.

      Adrian and I are incredibly compatible. We have discussed our life goals – two children, a house on the North Shore, private schooling. Preferably we will have a girl and a boy. There are ways of choosing gender I believe, something to do with yoghurt.

      Oops. I glance at my watch. My daydreaming has put me a little behind schedule with my social media, but that’s alright. Social media is not a critical event. I can reduce it to fifteen minutes. Opening Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram, I carefully work through my contacts. One third encourage, one third respond, one third com­municate. Building a social media platform is critical to success in the entertainment industry. Not that I could be said to be in the entertainment industry as such. Not yet. But I have ambitions.

      Dramatic music fills my head as it always does when I ruminate about my career aspirations. The correct musical accompaniment is important to set the scene. The music stops abruptly as I remember I haven’t told Adrian about my secret goal.

      Adrian used his extensive influence to get me an entry-level position at a TV station. He thinks I will use my new-found management talents in production. ‘Project management skills will get you a long way in television,’ Adrian says. One day I will have to tell him I have no intention of moving into management. And I will tell him soon – just not yet. I’m waiting for the right time.

      At the moment I am only a humble production assistant at Channel Five, but now I have a foot in the door, 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