Start at the End

Chapter 1

Three years ago

AUDREY

‘Just wait, you’ll change your mind! You’ll wake up one day and that biological clock will be blaring!’

It’s too early on a Monday morning for this.

Jill is my colleague. My age, mid-thirties, with babies three and four on the way.

She bounded into the office after the ultrasound last month, marched straight over to me, and said, ‘We thought we’d try for one more and of course we hit the jackpot, didn’t we! Twins!’

I was pretty sure I was meant to give a standing ovation. Instead I just said ‘Wow! Twins! Imagine!’ and tried very hard not to imagine it, because doing so would have broken me out in hives.

Mercifully, my phone vibrates now. I wave the device at Jill and point at the screen as if to convey that I have urgent business to attend to even though I’m the office manager and it’s probably a reminder to reorder the firm’s letterhead or finish the mandatory training.

Dear Audrey,

Thank you for sending the latest bill. On my calculations, we were overcharged $600.00 …

Shit. I processed the invoices in a rush last night, hurrying home to catch an online masterclass in advanced orchestration and acoustic sound analysis—something my boss, Peter, will neither understand nor appreciate.

He aims to ‘delight clients’. Not because he likes them.

But because they fund his ski trips to Aspen, which is an expensive endeavour from Australia’s capital, especially if you’re forced to ‘drag your ungrateful family of five with you’.

Peter has a very low tolerance both for his children and for the variety of careless errors I seem to litter through the workplace, as my mind is frequently anywhere but on this job.

Jill darts out of the kitchen. She spends several hours a day wrangling hyperemesis gravidarum in the office toilets and the rest of her time playing phone tag with the primary school principal, strategising about her eldest, Raphie.

He’s named for the Renaissance painter, she’d told me on my first day here in case I was confused, perhaps, that she might have named him after the Ninja Turtle.

Raphie was free-range-parented until he sent Jill into a spiralling meltdown, so now he’s enrolled at an exorbitantly priced Montessori school from which, on a particularly bad day last week, he managed to escape.

I flick on the kettle and read the rest of the client’s message.

I’m sure it’s just an oversight, but grateful if you could follow up.

Please note, I’ll be on a three-month work trip from tomorrow with patchy internet access.

Best,

Fraser Miller

Three months? What does he do?

My mistake with Jill was divulging my secret: I don’t want kids. Now she’s acting like my admission was some sort of stealth attack and has launched a relentless multi-level-marketing-like sales pitch for motherhood.

‘You say you don’t want them now,’ she chirped yesterday. ‘But you will! You’re still in your twenties.’

‘Thirty-four,’ I’d clarified.

‘Fertility drops off a cliff at thirty-five, Audrey …’

Not if I push it off first, Jill.

The water boils and I pour it into my Ruth Bader Ginsburg mug and let the tea brew while I heat my lunch and respond to the email.

Dear Fraser,

Thank you for your message. I’ll check this and get straight back to you. I hope you’re travelling somewhere warm.

Best,

Audrey Sullivan

I’m nothing if not an ironic mix of overqualified and administratively incompetent.

Perhaps ‘qualified for a different job’ is a better description, although I don’t want to think too hard about the pieces of paper that I technically do and don’t hold or the whole thing will bring on heart palpitations again.

With the response sent, I lean against the bench and shut my eyes.

I’ve been trying to incorporate micro-meditations into my day, even though I am not that sort of person and the entire staff is foiling it.

I’m half a nostril through a cycle of alternate-nostril breathing when another colleague, Brenda, materialises and starts ferreting for a tea bag and rattling through spoons just as Jill returns from her efficient performance in the bathroom and kicks off as if she’d never left.

The allday sickness detracts from her campaign, so she tries to conceal it from me, which is a good thing as I’m a sympathetic vomiter.

Spotting an accomplice, she sidles up to Tea-Bag Brenda and, in a holier-than-thou whisper—as if she’s just discovered some scandalous piece of office gossip, like why the senior accountant left so abruptly (mutinous affair with the executive assistant) or who leaves the microwave in such a state (Derek)—she says, ‘Audrey will regret this childless-by-choice malarkey, don’t you agree? ’

They glare at me so intensely that I’m forced to appraise myself in their wake: tailored black pants, ordinary white business shirt, flyaway brown hair in a loose ponytail.

It’s not high fashion, or any fashion really, but I’m sent to the dusty basement several times a week to retrieve archival boxes full of legal documents, so—

‘Is it just that you haven’t met the right man?’ Jill argues, through her heteronormative lens.

‘The right person,’ I suggest, but her face is blank.

I can’t pick this battle now. I’m freshly panicked about the fact that my friends melt at the sight of a baby while my insides twist. ‘Would you like to hold her?’ mothers ask, forcing the bundle into my arms, where it assimilates with my anxiety and starts screaming.

I don’t know how to operate babies. I don’t want to know!

Just as I’m willing the microwave to ding or my phone to illuminate with a legitimate, work-related matter that I must excuse myself to attend to instantly—paper jam, sticky-note shortage, demise of another tropical fish in the office aquarium—I seem to manifest Fraser’s reply, which I scrutinise as if my life depends on it.

Antarctica. Currently minus 57 degrees Celsius …

So, about as frosty as this office.

‘I blame the hormones in chicken,’ Jill declares, cradling her bump. Brenda, dunking her tea bag and staring into space, is probably rehashing her curriculum vitae or imagining herself on some beach in the Maldives, as I often do.

It’s actually climate change, I want to argue. It’s that I’m terrified of bringing a child into a future this bleak. I see myself abandoning the poor thing when I’m eighty. Over to you, kid. Apologies for Armageddon …

But I can’t say that. Jill will accuse me of traumatising her unborn twins. Instead, I nod, as if I’m seriously pondering the Hormonal-Chicken hypothesis and type to Fraser—a man I have never met:

Antarctica? Wow! Why?

p.s. Please tell me it’s the penguins?

‘It could be vaccines …’ Jill muses, her TED Talk taking a well-worn conspiratorial turn as Brenda, finally showing proof of life, flicks her eyes at mine.

The phone in my hand stays disappointingly silent.

Fraser is probably a busy man. My imagination dresses him in a dark suit and deposits him in a high-rise boardroom, lobbying about some vital piece of environmental Antarctic business.

I shouldn’t be fraternising with a client without chalking up the billable time, but as Jill is now drawing ‘causal links’ between my childlessness and what she frequently refers to in hushed tones as ‘feminism having gone too far’, I am absolutely desperate.

Sorry, I don’t mean to be inquisitive, Fraser. I’ve just never known someone to travel somewhere so remote. Are you a photographer? Is it the isolation?

‘It’s just unnatural not to want a baby, Audrey!’ Jill declares. ‘At church last Sunday, the pastor said—’

‘Audrey, can I have a word?’ Brenda interjects, finally roused from her mundanity-induced coma and hovering beside me, ready to airlift me out of Jill’s one-woman war on population decline. ‘There’s an anomaly in the weekly budget report you emailed earlier.’

Is this about Fraser Miller or some fresh mistake?

Either way, I rescue my lunch from the microwave and trail behind Brenda to her immaculate desk, where it becomes apparent that there is a yawning chasm between where I am now and where the exacting KPIs of Bates, Scrivener and Daley Family Law expect me to be.

It makes a refreshing change, at least, from being berated over my lack of maternal drive.

All through the conversation, I keep one eye on my phone. Have I offended him, somehow, with the inquisition?

Once Brenda lets me go, I type a hurried and professional followup while walking back to my desk.

Fraser, my apologies for taking up your time. I’ll be in touch soon re: your bill.

Tumbling into my workstation, I search ‘How to know if you’re having a quarter-life crisis’. Wait, that can’t be right. I’m thirty-ish now, four threes are twelve, carry the zero—Am I more than a third through my life already? What am I doing with it?

And that’s when a notification flashes, announcing an email from a former university classmate.

Subject: Bit of a weird one

Audrey, sorry to contact you out of the blue. Have you heard about this investigation into historic claims of academic misconduct?

I go stone cold. Everything rushes back.

The confusion. The fear. The shame and guilt and defeat.

Suddenly I don’t care about Jill or my fertility or Brenda’s spreadsheet or whatever percentage of a life crisis I was galloping towards.

I can’t think straight about any of it, because I’m right back at that distressing fork in the road where I so spectacularly lost my way.

I drop my phone on the desk as if it’s poison, which nudges the mouse and wakes the computer, the whole exchange with Fraser Miller fluttering into the inbox like a burst of sunshine.

Thanks, Audrey. Appreciate it. And no need to apologise.

Cheers,

Fraser

(Ocean scientist. Likes penguins.)