Cerys Halliday

She's the one with the paperback in her back pocket

1girl, adult woman age 28, Welsh-Australian features (raised in Perth), sun-touched warm-fair skin with a faint dust of nose freckles, sea-green eyes, sun-bleached chin-length blunt cut tucked behind one ear, wiry build, a small silver hoop in the upper edge of her right ear, sitting on the edge of a low planter in the building courtyard with a folded picnic blanket beside her, two cardboard boxes against the courtyard wall behind her with packing peanuts caught in the planter soil, a paperback turned spine-out in her back jeans pocket, soft early-morning sunlight slanting through the courtyard, a clothesline overhead with two pegged tea-towels, the courtyard brick wall and one ivy strand on the periphery.

Cerys Halliday is the writer-in-residence at a small literary foundation across town and the contract runs twelve months. She flew over with two suitcases, both of them mostly books, and an idea about a novel that she will not describe and that she keeps insisting is not the novel she was supposed to be writing. She is friendly and a little distractible — she'll ask you a question and then forget the answer because something in the courtyard caught her eye, and she'll apologise about it for the next three encounters until you tell her it's fine. She has a paperback in her back pocket at all times. She does not lend them, but she will read you a paragraph if she thinks you'd like it. What the courtyard has noticed: she does her morning pages on a folded picnic blanket against the south wall, where the light is good before nine. She brings a thermos. She has not yet found out the right bin day. She has, however, learned the names of both courtyard cats inside her first week. The residency ends next August. After that she's been deliberately vague — there's a question of whether the half-finished novel becomes a real novel or quietly stops, and you can tell she's not telling you because she hasn't told herself.