way up from her subconscious. No. No. Absolutely not.
She clutched the steering wheel and tried to calm her breathing. She’d been throwing back cold and flu tablets to try to clear her nose and the pseudoephedrine was making her heart race, as if something wonderful or terrible was about to happen. It reminded her of the feeling of walking down the aisle on both her wedding days.
She was probably addicted to the cold and flu tablets. She was easily addicted. Men. Food. Wine. In fact, she felt like a glass of wine right now and the sun was still high in the sky. Lately, she’d been drinking, maybe not excessively, but certainly more enthusiastically than usual. She was on that slippery slope, hurtling toward drug and alcohol addiction! Exciting to know she could still change in significant ways. Back home there was a half-empty bottle of pinot noir sitting brazenly on her writing desk for anyone (only the cleaning lady) to see. She was Ernest frigging Hemingway. Didn’t he have a bad back too? They had so much in common.
Except that Frances had a weakness for adjectives and adverbs. Apparently she scattered them about her novels like throw cushions. What was that Mark Twain quote Sol used to murmur to himself, just loud enough for her to hear, while reading her manuscripts? When you catch an adjective, kill it.
Sol was a real man who didn’t like adjectives or throw cushions. She had an image of Sol, in bed, on top of her, swearing comically as he pulled out yet another cushion from behind her head, chucking it across the room while she giggled. She shook her head as if to shake off the memory. Fond sexual memories felt like a point for her first husband.
When everything was good in Frances’s life she wished both her ex-husbands nothing but happiness and excellent erectile function. Right now, she wished plagues of locusts to rain down upon their silvery heads.
She sucked on the tiny vicious paper cut on the tip of her right thumb. Every now and then it throbbed to remind her that it might be the smallest of her ailments but it could still ruin her day.
Her car veered to the bumpy side of the road and she removed her thumb from her mouth and clung to the steering wheel. “Whoops-a-daisy.”
She had quite short legs, so she had to move the driver’s seat close to the steering wheel. Henry used to say she looked like she was driving a bumper car. He said it was cute. But after five years or so he stopped finding it cute and swore every time he got in the car and had to slide the seat back.
She found his sleep-talking charming for about five years or so too.
Focus!
The countryside flew by. At last a sign: Welcome to the town of Jarribong. We’re proud to be a TIDY TOWN.
She slowed down to the speed limit of fifty kph, which felt almost absurdly slow.
Her head swiveled from side to side as she studied the town. A Chinese restaurant with a faded red and gold dragon on the door. A service station that looked closed. A red-brick post office. A drive-through bottle shop that looked open. A police station that seemed entirely unnecessary. Not a person in sight. It might have been tidy but it felt postapocalyptic.
She thought of her latest manuscript. It was set in a small town. This was the gritty, bleak reality of small towns! Not the charming village she’d created, nestled in the mountains, with a warm bustling café that smelled of cinnamon and, most fanciful of all, a bookstore supposedly making a profit. The reviewers would rightly call it “twee,” but it probably wouldn’t get reviewed and she never read her reviews anyway.
So that was it for poor old Jarribong. Goodbye, sad little tidy town.
She put her foot on the accelerator and watched her speed slide back up to one hundred. The website had said that the turnoff was twenty minutes outside of Jarribong.
There was a sign ahead. She narrowed her eyes, hunched over the wheel to read it: Tranquillum House next turn on the left.
Her heart lifted. She’d done it. She’d driven six hours without quite losing her mind. Then her heart sank, because now she was going to have to go through with this thing.
“Turn left in one kilometer,” ordered her GPS.
“I don’t want to turn left in one kilometer,” said Frances dolefully.