The Writing Machine

It starts in the early eighties when Nick and Vince fall in love at an arts festival in a small town in Italy where Nick is tagging along with his partner Tom and his rag tag theatre group, The Deviant Behaviour Theatre company whose big drawcard is the brilliant clown, Celia, who is on the cusp of stardom. Vince is an electrician working at the festival. Nick is illiterate and mentally ill, and hiding a tragic past. But Vince only sees Nick’s good looks, his shy charm and elusive wit.

The story follows Nick on his journey to Australia to spend a month with Vince, while he tries to organise a residents permit. They take a road trip all the way across Australia, in the shadow of a law that would send them to prison for three years for their love, trying and failing to follow the advice they are given “Try not to be so obvious”

Back in England, Nick is determined to learn to read and write, to have his mental illness under control and to finish his schooling. He is also determined to help the police put a dangerous criminal behind bars. Nick feels responsible for helping him escape prosecution years earlier. But Nick is facing the shadow of a prosecution of his own for his teenage drug dealing and faces the suspicion that he is a murderer, something he even suspects about himself.

Jamila is a young conservative Muslim woman, who longs for the connection with her community and family her religion gives her, but stifled in her ambitious plans for a career. She plans to marry her best friend to gain independence. The only problem is that he is gay and a Christian.

Delia believes she has destroyed her relationship with her parents, Jenny and Adele forever because she denied them to help the political career of her biological father, and longs to win back their love and trust. But it doesn’t help that, while they are dyed in the wool Labor, she is making a name for herself in the conservative side of politics.

The rich and good looking Jamal falls for the plain and lonely Delia but she is only with him, as she tells him, because he is nice, good looking and because she is lonely.

After an evening with some friends of Jamal’s father, she realises that she and Jamal had once met before, as children, at an English seaside resort, playing with each other in the sand, unaware of the bitter divorce that was playing out around them.

Delia and Jamal are atheists, and regard religion as nonsensical and harmful. But their gifted daughter Alice, growing up with strong Muslim women like her grandmother, feels a pull toward their religion.

Nadia works up the courage to ask out the young woman Liss, with whom she has has kept up a nervous flirtation since they were both fourteen. But she has never told her mother and step father, who regard same sex relationships as haram, that she is a lesbian, and Liss detests the wealth of Nadia’s family.

These and other stories, all interrelated, are played out against the backdrop of the enduring love of Nick and Vince for each other, although they seem fated to never see each other again.