Chapter 9 #2
This is like that moment when there’s a medical emergency and they ask if there’s a doctor on board. Except I am the doctor. Or I would be, if I’d finished my PhD …
‘Audrey—’
‘It takes someone with experience to handle a Miller prodigy,’ I blurt out. Experience I can’t deny that I have, despite the way it all ended.
His brown eyes are alight in some jumble of fear and hope that my inner romantic could very easily latch on to and run away with, and I have to remind myself this is not about me at all. It’s about his daughter.
‘It wouldn’t have to be forever,’ he suggests, and I imagine an atom-sized objection floating between us, before it evaporates.
When I don’t answer, he stares at the dashboard, lips tight.
‘Sorry. I’m not usually this impulsive.’ I can see how excruciating it is for him to ask for help.
‘She’s miserable in afterschool care. Apparently it’s attended by her nemesis.
I don’t know that she’s strictly being bullied, but she’s certainly—’
‘Different?’ I remember this. ‘I was the classical music geek at school. Lunchtimes holed up in the music room, avoiding people who didn’t understand why I was playing an imaginary keyboard on my desk in algebra, like a freak …’
The memory lashes the air before I can censor myself.
I’d pushed from my mind how isolating it was, being obsessed with something conventionally ‘uncool’, trying to keep a lid on the passion as it leaked through the cracks.
The thought of that little girl who rushed into his arms feeling just as lost as I did makes the car seem hot, and I peel off my jumper.
Fraser flicks the key in the ignition to let the air-conditioning flow.
‘It might look miserable sometimes,’ I add, wanting to soften my admission in case it worries him, ‘but you don’t hear the music in our heads. The soundtrack we carry everywhere we go. I actually don’t know how people survive the world without it. It’s hallucinogenic, in the very best way …’
There’s that passion again, still bubbling through as my voice rises in pitch and volume, threatening to expose me again. Too weird. Too much.
But he breaks into a smile and leans towards me, elbow on the centre console. ‘I try to get home from work as early as I can. But I can’t rearrange the teaching timetable. It’s got a hundred moving parts. I hadn’t realised how much easier this all was when I was married.’
Is that regret? It’s definitely guilt.
‘You know, Fraser, I don’t have kids, but sometimes I think you can measure a good parent by the hours they lie awake at night. What are you meant to do? Quit your job? Leave human-kind in the lurch?’
He laughs. ‘You seem to have an inflated view of my work.’
I would beg to differ, citing the illustrious biography Rach and I studied on his university web page, but I can hardly admit that.
It’s irrelevant now, anyway. I already know I’ll say yes.
Obviously. I can’t let Parker struggle the way I did.
She needs to know the way she feels about music is normal.
Maybe I’ll heal my inner child? At least, that’s what her mother would probably say.
God. What will his ex make of this plan?
‘Seriously, if you were to consider this even for a short while, I figure by the time you pay me for rent and I pay you for music lessons and childcare and dog-minding, you’d be ahead. And the rest of the time would be yours. Maybe you’d have space to finish the musical?’
Is he aware how persuasive this is?
‘Surely it needs a duet about penguins?’
It does need that. He’s barely suggested the idea, and I’m hearing their tapping feet in the chorus.
I take him in, sitting here under the streetlights, shadows from the trees playing across his face—domestically vulnerable, acting legitimately interested in my show and offering a temporary solution to my leading logistical problem.
‘I’d thought about asking Josh to give Parker a few lessons,’ he adds, leading the elephant carefully into the room. He checks my response. ‘You didn’t abandon him when he got the gig on that first album, did you?’
Is that the story Josh gave them?
The injustice of it all surges under Fraser’s inquisitive gaze, and he says, ‘None of it ever added up. I knew at the time he’d have thrown even his girlfriend under the bus, if—’
‘No, it wasn’t like that,’ I interrupt, placing my hand on his arm for emphasis. ‘I mean, the bus, yes. He flung me under it. But it was only ever a creative partnership between us.’
I could unpack exactly how things were between Josh Miller and me for days, but why would I pollute this conversation with that?
Fraser is dangling a sanctuary and the space to compose.
Fraser, who worries about his daughter and writes charming emails and says nice, encouraging things about my show.
Rach messages again.
If you won’t move in with him, Audrey, I will!
My heart flies. If I were playing this true to form, I’d reject the offer on the grounds of needing to make it through this unfortunate blip independently.
I would self-sabotage, but with my head held high.
That’s what I’ve always done. And where has it got me?
Deferring to others’ success. Sweeping up the dropped pieces of my own life after it smashes to the floor.
This is exactly the reason my classical career crashed—because I’ve never known how to put myself first.
‘All right, Professor Miller,’ I concede, expecting a panic attack at the spontaneity of this decision but finding my nervous system surprisingly calm. ‘What sort of dog is Betty?’
Three days later, I’m dragging a heavy suitcase from my boot and channelling Julie Andrews paused at the gates of the von Trapp mansion—or Fraser’s Braddon townhouse, in my case—complete with guitar.
He has only one child, but for all I know about how to interact with her, he might as well have the full complement of seven.
‘You met this guy when?’ my sister, Sara, squawks into the phone when I call to report my temporary change of address. ‘And you’re already moving in?’
‘It’s not like that! He’s got a spare room.
We have a mutual friend!’ It’s as if I’m chanting these facts to myself as I ring the doorbell.
‘Oh, and I went to uni with his brother.’ The less said about that, the better.
If Sara finds out exactly who Fraser’s brother is, she will go through the roof.
Sara is a data analyst. She deals in risk.
Ever since my final year of school, when our parents—both in the army—were posted away and left Sara in charge of me, she has watched my rudderless path through life with her heart in her mouth.
‘Keep me on the phone, Audrey! People can still be brutally attacked by the brothers of people they went to uni with!’ she points out loudly, on speaker, just as Fraser flings open the door and the phone falls from my shoulder, where it was cradled, into one of the bags I’m carrying.
He seems less concerned about my sister’s accusation and more perplexed by the amount of baggage I’ve brought, between what I’ve dragged onto his doorstep already and the volume of possessions still bursting out of my illegally parked car.
My main problem, meanwhile, is the way golden-hour sunlight filters through his light brown floppy fringe, studious glasses perched on his nose, tie loosened, shirtsleeves rolled up as if he’s not long home from the office and I’ve interrupted him making dinner in front of the evening news.
This is the sort of gentle, humble person I’d usually stand beside in the lunchtime rush at a sandwich bar and not even notice. Why am I nervous?
It’s the responsible-looking ones you have to watch, Sara would explain. To be fair, she warns me off every sort of man. Nobody would pick him as a potential heartbreaker in a line-up, Audrey. He’s an underdog. Keep your wits about you!
‘Is this still okay?’ I ask. Part of me wants him to turn me around and say, Actually, Audrey, I’ve come to my senses. This is, in fact, ludicrous!
Instead, he reaches for the biggest suitcase and pulls it, and me, towards the threshold and further into his life, saying, ‘Let me help you.’
He holds open the door, and I try to squeeze past with my assortment of plastic bags, including an extra-large orange one bulging with the laundry I didn’t do in the frantic packup.
Attempting to hoick everything in while he stands there, we’re jammed close, sandwiched by the plastic bag in a not entirely unfortunate turn of events, during which I can’t help but inhale the woodsy, masculine scent of his aftershave as it goes straight to my head and triggers the apologies to run away with me.
‘Sorry, Fraser. I’ll just squeeze through.
Oh, hello!’ My face is thrust right up into his rather startled one as we’re wedged even tighter by the force of my belongings. ‘Breathe!’ I encourage him. ‘Push!’
Why am I carrying on like a midwife coaxing a labouring mother through the ring of fire?
Then I’m catapulted into the hall, bag exploding on impact, and my unmentionables, as my mother would describe them, tumble out of it onto the pristine floor.
‘What a muddle!’ I exclaim, now apparently channelling the narrator from the Thomas the Tank Engine series, because it would be far too big an ask for me to converse normally. ‘Thought we’d have to call the fire brigade to dislodge us!’ I barrel on. Stop making a thing of it!
He’s still standing there, my suitcase in his hand, staring at the impact site. And at me. Listening to my sister, whose muffled voice is persisting from inside the bag. Perhaps he’s trying to work out what he has suggested here, and whether it’s too late to redact his offer.
‘I really appreciate this,’ I gush, scooping out my phone, ending the call, and trying to stuff my things back into the bag, which, having split in half, has now retired.
‘You won’t even know I’m here!’ I over-promise, staggering up from the floor.
‘In the same way that a cyclone might pass me by?’
Please don’t be witty, too!
Following him upstairs, I say, ‘You look like the sort of landlord who’d have a full disaster plan printed in a binder on the coffee table.’ Now I have a mental picture of him in a bright red hard hat, which he would ably carry off, in a delicious mix of white-collar worker and emergency hero.
He shows me into a furnished bedroom with leafy views across Haig Park.
Then, having deposited my suitcase on the bed, he steps back, lingering in the doorway.
I zip open my bag, aware of him leaning against the frame, feet crossed at the ankles in that unintentionally confident way that invites easy conversation, while I start flinging everything into the piles I should have attended to before I moved.
A rogue stiletto, destined for donation, plants itself in the pot beside him, monstera fronds waving as if a storm is going through.
He bends down and retrieves the shoe, so now he’s standing there, holding it, looking at me in the manner of Prince Charming as he says, ‘You don’t strike me as someone who’d be easy to marshal in an emergency. You seem more like the threat itself.’
I meet the amused sparkle in his eyes and am struggling to articulate a clever response when he tosses my shoe aside, checks his watch, and in a completely understated, humble and matter-of-fact tone, says, ‘I’ve got a BBC interview with the British secretary of state for the environment at eight.’
Oh, yes. I’d momentarily forgotten I’d shacked up with one of the world’s leading experts in changing ocean currents.
In an attempt to mitigate any rogue fangirling, I plaster on a neutral expression, as if it’s normal for people in my circle to utter such sentences, and mumble, ‘Of course. Yes. That’s—’ Vitally important? Enthralling? Extraordinary?
‘Shall I heat up some soup?’ he asks when I’m unable to complete my sentence. It’s like being socked in the face with one glorious suggestion after another. ‘Do you like red or white wine?’
I’m sure I can’t even remember!
‘Throw me your keys,’ he adds. ‘Don’t want you to get towed.’
So now he’ll put a roof over my head, rescue my car, pour me a drink, and serve me dinner before doing his absolute best to salvage the planet before bedtime. And there, unavoidably, trots a piece of my heart in his direction. Already.