Chapter 36
AUDREY
With my insurance papers stuffed into my shirt, I rush through the rain and knock on the Viper’s metal door.
‘It’s open!’ he calls, and I reach for the handle and hoist myself into another realm. The caravan is palatial. Cinema seating, ducted heating, mood lighting, surround sound. Premium everything. And it’s so warm.
I think of the stash of adhesive toe warmers in my car and the solar-operated lantern from Kmart, just as my eyes are drawn to the kitchen bench, upon which sits a bottle of wine in a metal ice bucket and two long-stemmed glasses.
My heart gallops. Blood vessels alert. Still.
Condensation clings to the bucket where ice meets heat, and the olive-green glass of the bottle beckons me into a habitual freefall. Once again, I step back from the edge. Breathing. Mantras. The distraction, in this case, of an immensely attractive man …
Whatever he thinks he’s doing with this come-hither little tableau, it’s not happening. I pull the paperwork from my top and serve it to him, officiously, to make the point that I have signed up for the business transaction. Not the seduction experience.
‘Take a seat?’ he suggests, examining me more closely in the proper light, while I try to resist the apology slipping from the tip of my tongue about the first impression I must be making.
‘Thanks for the offer, but I won’t stay,’ I explain, waving at the wine. ‘Not that the idea isn’t enticing after the day I’ve had.’ I don’t know what my sober mouth thinks it’s talking about.
He glances at the ice bucket and back at me, thoughtfully.
‘I wasn’t driving under the influence, if that’s what you’re imagining,’ I blurt out. I have done many regrettable things around alcohol, but never that.
‘Actually, I’ve got someone coming over shortly,’ he explains, gently detangling my awkward assumption, onto which I seem to have piled an unnecessary suggestion that I committed a crime.
He rakes a hand through freshly washed dark hair, and only now do I note the change of clothes.
The different jeans. The dry shirt. The scent of cedar wood cologne and the sound of water still dripping in the shower cubicle, which, in my defence, he invited me to use just minutes ago.
‘Anyway, what’s the next step?’ I ask him, summoning my inner Mr Drucker.
‘I thought you were the admin genius?’
I seem to have overstated my prowess. ‘This is my first car accident,’ I say, truthfully.
Looking as though he finds this fact very difficult to swallow, he flicks through my insurance policy.
‘Okay, Hepburn,’ he says, although my resemblance to that Audrey is unfortunately nil.
‘We need to swap details and call our insurers.’ He slides his own papers across the table with an impressively tattooed hand and says, ‘I’m Beau. ’
As in French for ‘handsome’? And ‘boyfriend’.
It’s a softer name than I’d expected for such a rugged-looking specimen of a man, and I’m lecturing myself to drop this bilingual nonsense and pull myself together, when he passes me his phone and says, ‘Mind if we swap numbers in case there’s anything to discuss? ’
Of course! I rammed his car and owe him thousands in insurance money. He probably thinks I’m a flight risk! ‘Should we cut our thumbs and make a blood oath?’ I joke.
He looks at me, horrified. ‘I don’t think it’s necessary for us to exchange bodily fluids, Audrey. Do you?’
Try as I might, I cannot stem the blush that rises furiously to my cheeks.
Thankfully I’m saved by a knock at his door, followed by the swanning in of a woman in a slip of material that looks like it cost $400, her wet skin glistening as she shakes rainwater off long platinum hair like an Afghan hound.
I don’t know about Beau, but I’m mesmerised. She beams at him before she clocks me and my rescue-dog-from-the-pound aesthetic and says, ‘Sorry, did I mix up the time?’
Are we on some sort of roster? My head goes into a full-blown David Attenborough narration as the woman glides past me, scented like a field of wildflowers, plants a soft kiss on Beau’s cheek, and then wipes lipstick from his face afterwards with a perfectly manicured thumb.
The amenities block is out of order, I want to point out. This top hasn’t been washed, and the other was saturated after I crashed into Beau’s ute. Thankfully I say none of that and just stand here looking starstruck.
‘I’m Harlow,’ she says, in an appropriately silken voice, taking my unexpected presence in her stride. I’ve gone all ungainly in her presence, as if I can’t work out how to stand.
‘Audrey parked next door,’ Beau explains.
Is this the most interesting observation he can muster?
I’d almost rather the embarrassment of the full dramatic story.
I wait for him to deliver a punchline about my parking, but he doesn’t.
Perhaps he’s saving it for later, when they unpack the scenario in bed.
It was pouring. She was in those ridiculous yellow Wellingtons, blaring Cynthia Erivo …
Although, surely they have better things to whisper about across their pillows than my footwear.
‘Well! You seem to have everything in hand here,’ I tell them. I’ve gone full site-supervisor-wrapping-up-a-visiting-inspection. ‘Beau, I’ll make that call in the morning. And thanks for, you know—’ I can’t articulate the list—we’d be here all night.
He waves his hand as if it’s a mere trifle that he didn’t explode at my wanton destruction. His guest lifts the bottle from the ice and decorks the wine with the skill of a sommelier, the pop firing an explosion of full-body muscle memory straight through my body.
This is not her first rodeo in the lair, I can tell. It’s also my signal to leave.
Extricating myself from their love nest, I trudge into the wet night, back to my leaky car and decadesold little caravan, sans ambient light and music and heat and the kind of heady testosterone that I didn’t know I missed so much.
Heady testosterone. Not a term paired with my beautiful, gentle Fraser, as a rule.
Not by people who knew him only as a quiet academic.
Behind closed doors, though, when it was just the two of us … that man and all the ways he knew me!
I’d imagined this moment for ages: my first night on the road.
I’d envisaged a campfire under the stars and fairy lights in the window.
I was meant to see out my old life—the last day of my thirties—and usher in my fortieth outside my comfort zone, with some sort of sunset clearing ritual.
Burning what I want to let go. Journalling dreams. Opening my heart.
But instead I head a little way up the park and into the shrubs with a toilet paper roll, then tramp back, lock myself in the caravan, and use my phone’s torch to find something dry and warm to sleep in.
The light goes out before I can. Battery drained. So all I can do is feel my way into the bed, pull the blankets up around me, and listen to the rain on the tin roof, deciding tomorrow will be easier. Sunnier. Less accident-prone.
This whole decade will be better. It has to be.
I’m not sure what wakes me first: the squawking magpies or the smell of bacon and eggs sizzling outside my window. Wrapping myself in a blanket, I open the door to see my neighbour illuminated by crisp sunlight, tongs in hand.
‘Happy birthday, Hepburn,’ he says as I emerge, sloth-like. He’s in grey sweatpants, a thin black hoodie pushed up to the elbows, showcasing the tattoo of an incomplete nautical compass on his forearm.
What’s that about, then? The thrill of the unknown?
He mistakes the concentration on my face as confusion. ‘Your birth date’s on the insurance papers,’ he says. ‘Couldn’t help but notice it’s a significant one.’
I hadn’t expected this attention. Colour rushes to my cheeks as I wonder, fleetingly, if I’m older or younger than Beau.
Older, I’m sure. And then I realise, with a jolt, that I’m also older than Fraser ever was.
He hadn’t made it to forty. My heart plummets at the idea of overtaking him, as if he’s taken a tumble in a race and I haven’t stopped to help him up because then we’ll both lose …
The sight of this stranger standing here, frying up a full English on the first milestone birthday I’ve been dreading without Fraser, leaves me breathless and prickly hot.
I throw off the blanket, and it bunches around my legs as I kick it back into the caravan and step barefoot onto cooling grass, damp with dew.
‘You okay?’ Beau asks, turning the sausages. ‘You’re not vegetarian?’
I don’t even know where to begin or how to explain the swirl of emotions here, but whether or not I consume meat is the very least of our challenges.
‘Is this all for me?’ I glance at the eggs and mushrooms, then up at his caravan, expecting the Hound to bound out of it any second, fresh-faced and resplendent with beachy bed hair, shrouded in afterglow.
‘Depends how hungry you are,’ he replies, nodding at the caravan and adding, ‘Harlow didn’t stay.’
‘Ah.’ I try to decode that statement and how, if at all, it applies to me personally, while engineering an air of casual disinterest, as if the idea of the two of them rolling around on his premium foam mattress, discussing my galoshes, had never occurred to me, just as a council truck rumbles into the park and stops near the shower block.
Two workers in high-vis vests amble out of it and promptly go on smoko.
‘Listen, why don’t you grab a shower in my caravan while I cook?’ Beau suggests, frowning at their lack of urgency. ‘There’s fresh coffee ready to go in the machine. Just hit the start button.’
My eyes drift from the mud that is still caked on my ankles to the scrapes of white paint on his ute. In broad daylight, the damage makes my stomach churn, and I walk over and inspect the back of Miss Bennet, who fared even worse.
‘Don’t worry about that,’ he says, waving the tongs at the dents. ‘I reckon I can fix it. You won’t even notice.’
‘I must say this is all … very good of you,’ I admit.
Either it’s good of him, or he’s grooming me for one of the many spurious outcomes on my sister’s comprehensive list of ways that I could die during this ‘midlife camping crisis’.
Although, if that was his plan, why would he have texted a photo of his driver’s licence late last night, which I expeditiously forwarded to Sara, as instructed, In case I need to show the police, Audrey.
‘It’s really not that bad,’ he says, nodding at the ute. ‘As long as nobody gets hurt.’
Fraser used to say that. And then he got hurt, while my own pain snowballed into eight months of whiteout shock.
A tumbling, alcohol-fuelled, antigravity avalanche through which I could barely see nor stand until it cleared into the white-hot precision pain of sobriety.
No more smoke or mirrors. Unadulterated agony, from which it has taken nearly two and a half years to painstakingly claw myself here.
That’s what this trip is all about. Feeling something good. Breaking the inertia and making progress in this plot twist of a life I’ve been handed.
‘Do you mind if I charge my phone?’ I ask, wishing I’d charged the solar power pack before I left home. Maybe I’ll take up the offer of a few minutes locked inside Beau’s mansion of a caravan to get my head together. ‘I left my sister hanging last night, and she thinks you’re a murderer.’
His rich laugh sails across the camping ground as I retreat to collect my things.
And myself. Sara would see breakfast with this man as the equivalent of my teenage cliff-diving.
She’s spent forty years exactly today dragging me to solid ground, pulling me from rocks and rips—forever alert to undercurrents I always ignore.
When I first mentioned his ocean scientist, likes penguins sign-off, she took one look at my face and warned me about the ‘dangerous sparkle’ in my eyes.
My greatest worry now is that she’ll never have to concern herself with that sparkle again.
Beau is heaping shredded potato onto the barbecue when I reemerge. I don’t tell him I skipped dinner in all the kerfuffle last night, but I steal a strip of cooked bacon on my way past, making my vigorous appetite evident.
Once I’m under the hot water, availing myself of his ocean-scented shower gel and inhaling the steam, I’m overcome by a wild sense of wonder.
How did I get here?
Here, in this strange man’s caravan, on the morning of my fortieth birthday, when I should be with Fraser, who would be showering with me until the water ran cold.
Birthdays mess with my head. They convince me the butterfly effect is real—that every tiny step we’ve ever taken, every decision we’ve made, every conversation we’ve ever had has brought us to this specific moment in time.
That line of thought inevitably leads me straight back to the day I lost him.
And how I lost him. Wondering—if either of us had flapped our proverbial wings just a fraction of a second earlier or later, if we’d uttered one more word, or even taken a slightly longer breath—whether everything might have been different …