Chapter 40
AUDREY
It’s like being in the school corridor with the popular boy. I’m pretty certain the cafe’s teenage employee is just as clueless as I am about who Beau is exactly, but he’s got the presence of being someone, and she is blushing furiously just taking his coffee order.
‘Ssorry, was that one or two shots?’ she asks him, flustered. ‘I know you already said—’
‘No trouble at all,’ he reassures her, with patience that seems off-script for the model-dating, Oscar-nominated, social-pages-inhabiting big deal of a person I’ve built up in my mind. ‘Two shots, thanks. Didn’t sleep well.’
She notes this down and underlines it as he returns his attention to me. Am I the cause of his lack of sleep?
‘Writer’s block,’ he reminds me. Of course! What am I doing, casting myself as the cause of his insomnia?
‘What are you stuck on, exactly?’ I’ve stepped into my professional self, as if I’m his script adviser and this is an emergency meeting to help shape his narrative arc.
‘This is going to sound worse than it is,’ he begins, and I find myself leaning forward, glued to his incoming confession. He pauses and smiles, skin crinkling around his eyes behind his sunglasses, as he says, ‘Should I wait while you get out a tape recorder?’
I sit back, bolt upright. ‘Sorry!’ I blurt. ‘I’m just … also in a creative industry.’ It’s a gross exaggeration, but ‘professional empathy’ is a better excuse than unbridled nosiness.
‘A creative industry that relies heavily on spreadsheets?’
Oh, lord, I need to steer this back to him and why he’s stuck, in case he asks me for evidence of career success I can’t produce.
‘Tell you my story later,’ I promise, wondering exactly what I’m intending to share, and buying the time to invent it.
He exhales like an athlete calming his nerves at the start of a sprint. ‘So there was a woman …’
Of course there was. I all but bang my fist on the table like a gavel, case closed.
‘Let’s just say I allowed write what you know to get out of hand.
It was fine while things were going well, but then we fell apart, she got lawyers involved, the project crashed, and to cut a very long, very fraught, very expensive story short, I need to come up with an entirely new character for the female lead in my movie in the next seven days or my reputation in the industry will be shot. ’
He breathes again, trapped words exorcised.
‘I see,’ I say. I very much don’t see, and need much more information, but at this point I am most definitely riveted.
‘I told you mine. Now you tell me yours,’ he challenges me, his penetrating dark blue eyes fixed on mine, as if we’re at a press conference and there will be no further comment about his situation.
‘Do you have any ideas?’ I barge on with the tenacity of a good journalist, ignoring his demand. ‘Anything at all? Seven days seems impossible!’
The coffee appears, and he stares at it the way a fortune teller might focus on a cup, as if he’s trying to divine a fresh plotline from the swirls of froth.
Steam curls gently into the strong lines of his face, and the whole visage just smoulders.
If I’m not careful, I will slip into some sort of hypnosis …
‘Nothing that’s working,’ he admits. He looks up from his coffee with a disarming level of vulnerability for someone with his track record of success. It sends me into a momentary panic. If it’s this hard for him at this advanced point in his career, then when, if ever, does it get easier?
‘In my case, it feels even worse than writer’s block,’ I begin, his candour breaking me open. ‘Not that I’m trivialising what you’re going through—gosh, it sounds like hell. I just mean, oh, God. This is such a complicated story …’
Now it’s him leaning forward, arms crossed on the table, intense gaze inviting me to gift him the part of my history that I rarely disclose. Could he really be this interested? I sense the story bubbling to the surface and rushing towards him in a burst of uncharacteristic frankness.
‘Something bad happened to me early in my career. A professor did something to me—’
I falter, the way I always falter telling this tale, and Beau reaches across the table.
I try not to allow it to thrill me as much as it clearly does when he places both his hands over mine, his grasp warm and firm and certain, while I instruct myself not to get carried away, because he’s literally just explained that he’s heartbroken.
‘Sorry, Audrey. I didn’t mean to intrude … You don’t have to tell me unless you want to.’
Oh, I want to. ‘It’s not the way it sounds. He took something from me, but it wasn’t … that.’
He looks relieved, lets go of my hands, eases back, and slowly stirs his coffee, the metal spoon tinkling against the ceramic cup, steam still rising cinematically in the morning sunlight.
‘You’re really not a viper at all, are you?’ I say before I can stop myself.
He laughs. ‘Not that I’m aware of?’
‘Your caravan. Outback Viper?’
He shrugs. ‘Oh, it’s not mine. The production company rented it so I could, quote, “sort out my shit”. They thought I’d have a clearer head here than in my Sydney high-rise.’ He glances at me. ‘Fewer distractions.’
Now I’m picturing him and a parade of alluring Alisters on some plush designer lounge, city lights twinkling across the harbour through floor-to-ceiling windows.
It’s not my world. Not anywhere near it.
Perhaps that’s why it’s so easy to open up?
Because there’s a part of this that doesn’t feel real.
‘What did the professor take from you?’ he asks, serious eyes considering me through dark lashes.
‘He was one of those charismatic lecturers. Fortyish, attractive, clever. He had all the students in his thrall, including me. You know the type?’
He is the type. Look at the easy way he’s extracting my secrets—information that, apart from Fraser and Rach and Sara, I’ve kept from my closest friends.
I haven’t talked about this for so long, and it’s not how it started that makes it so difficult.
It’s how it ended. And when. And I don’t care how many tricks he tries to entrance me with—I’m not prepared to tell him about the day Fraser died. Not on day two.
‘It was that edgy rock star vibe, you know? Except he wasn’t a rock musician. He was one of the most respected classical composers in the country. Still is. And my composition teacher.’
‘What was your degree?’
‘This was during my doctorate.’
‘Wow, so it’s Dr Sullivan, is it?’
Academic failure rises up my oesophagus like bile, and I look at him and want to run from this. ‘You’re not going to put this in one of your screenplays, are you?’ I say, suddenly overcome with my usual problem: I don’t trust people.
He crosses his heart and holds my gaze steady. I haven’t seen anyone do that since the primary school playground, and it’s extraordinarily attractive on a grown screenwriter as he sits across from you, in absolutely no hurry, while you gather your skeletons.
‘Anyway, after this incident—let’s call it academic thievery—I lost my confidence. He stole my intellectual property. My faith in people. And in myself.’ I’m awkward now. ‘Sorry, this sounds so dramatic—’
‘No, it doesn’t,’ Beau says, quickly. ‘We pour so much of ourselves into what we make. If someone stole even a line or two from me, I’d be furious. I’d storm in and steal it right back!’
Joshua energy. Pre-betrayal. I’m momentarily thrown.
‘What happened then?’
‘I gave up for a while …’ A decade, give or take.
‘I was twenty-two. He convinced me I wasn’t talented enough to have written what I did.
Turned the whole thing around in meticulous detail and accused me of stealing ideas from him.
He told me a creative path was too hard.
And that I was too thin-skinned to cope with the knocks.
He planted so much doubt and made me so scared of the ramifications for my career if I spoke up that he silenced me. I thought I was going crazy.’
‘Classic professional gaslighting.’
I don’t tell him the worst bit. That it wasn’t a spontaneous response from Ridges.
It had been calculated. He’d prepared for days.
And the reason he even had that opportunity was because I had been double-crossed by the one friend who could have truly backed me up.
The one who’d been there in the room when I wrote the piece, watching as the notes fell out of my head. And who’d said they were brilliant.
‘I’m afraid to say that he only stole one piece of work, and I allowed it all to snowball in my mind until I might as well have given him everything. All the unwritten music. All the power. I walked away from him. And from classical music …’
‘And from yourself?’ he asks, after a pause.
I look straight at him. ‘I completely lost my way.’
Lost my way? Is this my new euphemism for what happened when the plagiarism kickstarted a nightmare that blew up everything? It did more than silence the music. The timing of my eventual response took Fraser down with it. And then it all but destroyed me.
‘Lost your way and turned up here,’ he says. ‘With musical theatre blaring in your car. You said you’re writing a show?’
I might as well put everything out on the table. ‘That’s not going well, either …’
He laughs. ‘What a pair! Why do we torture ourselves? Maybe we should get reliable jobs, where we don’t—’
‘No,’ I interrupt, quite forcefully. ‘I’ve done that. And as scary as all of this is, not trying this when you want to so badly is even harder.’
We choose this. Nobody is standing over us, gun to head, forcing us to do this work while relentless questions swirl in an endless crisis of confidence: Is this any good? Will anyone like it? Will their opinions crush it? Crush me? Am I making anyone care?
‘I’m forty,’ I go on. ‘The age my professor was when it happened. But so far behind.’
He shrugs. ‘Pfft! Behind whom? Haven’t you seen all those inspirational stories about late bloomers? What’s your musical about?’
I’ve gone clammy, the way I always do when people ask. Because the answer is invariably much bigger than the simple question they think they’ve raised.
It’s about being widowed. Just say it. But as soon as I even think about that, a montage of memories pushes forward of all the times I’ve tried to break this news gently in the past. People physically reeling, as if assaulted by my situation.
The awkward silences. All the platitudes when, desperate to ease the horrendous pressure hanging between us, they say the least helpful things of all.
At least he didn’t suffer … At least it was quick, Audrey. That must be comforting?
Not having a chance to say goodbye? The ending of it all, just instantly. Where’s the comfort in that?
Beau is watching me closely, waiting patiently for my brain to step through all of this and make my announcement.
‘The working title is Widowed: The Musical.’
I stare him down, daring him to panic. Expecting him to pull out his wallet, place some cash on the table, and make an excuse to get away from this. Away from me and all my broken pieces.
You have to be strong to deal with the story of my life.
Unflappable, once we face the inevitable How did it happen?
And the even worse How did you cope? When I share those answers, it’s like I’m stripping off my clothes, each awful piece of information exposing yet another layer, until there’s nothing left but bare skin and open wounds and the gnawing guilt that I’ll never shake, because what sort of person would I be if I forgave myself?
People can’t be near the naked truth. What if the ice I’m standing on cracks, and they fall through, too? So I run the safer mantra: I’m fine. It’s fine. We’re all fine.
But it turns out I don’t have to say any of that now, because Beau simply looks at me, calmly, still leaning forward, striking eyes compassionate and deeply engaged. There’s no sign of flight. He isn’t trying to reassemble me or distract me. He doesn’t seem to know we might fall.
He simply says, ‘I’m sorry, Hepburn,’ in a tone that is warm and real and strong, accompanied by body language that suggests he is not going anywhere. ‘I really am. That’s fucked.’