Being the other woman: An excerpt from Sydney-based writer Madeleine Gray’s debut novel, ‘Green Dot’

“This will allow me to observe how the rest of the people live, in their offices, day after day, going to after-work drinks, buying succulents on the weekend.”

When I first meet my married man, I have not yet worked it out. I have been through a fair bit of pain and I am aimless and sapped, despite still being in my mid-twenties, which seems young to most people but not to people in their mid-twenties. I feel like I have lived for a very long time, and the prospect of having to keep doing it until I die is exhausting.

I am in Sydney, the city of my birth, and I am living in my father’s house because I do not have any money on account of the choices I’ve made. I’ve spent the years since school trying to kick and scream into existence a life I care about and have a stake in protecting and cultivating. I have loved someone but not enough to want to stay with her forever, and she deserves more than that and so do I.

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I’ve finished degrees in other cities and now I have them and I don’t really know what else to think about them, these degrees, these bits of paper. My degrees are the years of freedom from work that I have bought with money aka loans. Unfortunately there are only so many degrees you can do before it occurs to those around you that your passion might actually be less for study and more for not working a job. You can do one PhD, but if you do a second people tend to ask what is wrong.

After another day of being 24 years old and living in my father’s house and listening to his records and wondering when he will be home from work because I look forward to talking to him, I decide to answer The Smiths’ immortal question: soon is, in fact, now. I need to go on Seek and find myself a job, and then do that job, and then ‘start’ a ‘life’. I cannot think of ways to put it off any longer and I have listened to Morrissey’s emphatic drawl too many times. Our dog, Jude, who acknowledges my position as second-in-command when Dad is not home, follows me from the lounge room to Dad’s study.

I place my laptop on the desk and sit myself in Dad’s chair. Jude lies down with his chin on my feet. I am 24 and I am scrolling Seek in order that I might find an opportunity to produce content in exchange for money so I can move out of my father’s house and pay a few hundred dollars a week to live somewhere less nice and tell people that I am independent and that my life is following a recognisable bildungsroman narrative arc.

I return to the desk, play a Taylor Swift song for motivation and refresh the page. Now at the top of the screen, above the ads for a content producer for a cancer charity and a content producer for a government department for ‘digital transformation’, sits a new, gleaming prospect. Online community moderator. There it is!

Have I ever had any aspirations to be an online community moderator? I cannot say that I have. However, this job is advertised by a well-respected and smart-signifying media organisation, and I figure that this is likely the only way I’ll ever get an interview to work in those hallowed journalistic halls, being as how I have no non-retail job experience because, as mentioned, I have never wanted a job. Compelled by a deranged masochistic impulse, like squeezing a pimple that is not ready to be popped, I think: ‘Perfect.’

I think: ‘This will allow me to observe how the rest of the people live, in their offices, day after day, going to after-work drinks, buying succulents on the weekend, hoping for “promotions”. If I get this job I’ll have enough money to live and I can spend my days judging those who are trying to make the system work for them more earnestly than I am.’

When I google the position to see if there is a Reddit thread or a Glassdoor review that might help me to nail the cover letter, what I instead find is a widely shared opinion piece by someone who was once an online community moderator, the title of which is ‘I tried to kill myself after two years as an online community moderator’. The rest of the article is, as one of my old teachers would say, ‘what it says on the tin’.

The writer describes how his job was to delete racist comment after racist comment, block trolls and impotently attempt to attenuate the worst of humanity, and that after a while he thought a better alternative would be to asphyxiate himself in his Mazda, Willy Loman–style. I see this article as a positive sign, suggesting that there will be less job competition for me, like when a murder has occurred in a house so then the house sells for less at auction. I guess in this case it is more like buying a house cheaply but with the murderer still at large in the house with no promise that he will ever leave, but no matter, who doesn’t like adrenaline and saving cash dollars? I begin to construct my cover letter.

“My name is Hera Stephen and I am passionate about online community moderation. As the world becomes more and more divided, it is increasingly important to facilitate the operation of discursive platforms for community members to engage in meaningful discussion and debate about the news of the day. I am committed to ensuring that open political debate can flourish in a safe online environment, in which freedom of speech is valued but hate speech is not tolerated. I am a diligent worker with a fine attention to detail and I enjoy working both in teams and on solo projects. I am self-motivated and will bring tenacious energy to this role.”

Christ. The way it slips out of me like mercury is disconcerting. Like I am made of bullshit, and my skin just contains it until I type. Eventually I press ‘submit’ on the application, and I close my laptop defiantly, as if I have achieved something.

This is an edited extract from Green Dot by Madeleine Gray (Allen and Unwin), out now.