Chapter 42
AUDREY
‘Hepburn, I’m taking my writer’s block on a road trip to one of my film settings today,’ Beau announces. ‘If you’re not frantically busy’—he glances at the novel in my hand as evidence that I am not—‘why don’t you come with me?’
It’s obvious I’ve been idling through the first weekend of my open-ended sabbatical. Having just woken up, I rack my brain for plausible reasons why getting in Beau Davenport’s dented RAM and tearing up and down the highway is not going to work for me today. But I’m coming up short.
He’s in jeans and a white singlet, pegging his washed clothes on a line under his caravan’s awning. The singlet, bunched at his waist, rises and falls as he pegs his clothes, revealing washboard abs that pull me smartly to full consciousness.
‘Is this your completed OOTD?’ I ask, pretend yawning to disguise how fascinated I am.
‘My what?’
‘Outfit of the Day,’ I explain, translating the acronym and wondering how someone as cool as him wouldn’t have already known it.
He sends me a Jonathan Bailey circa Wicked smoulder and replies, ‘I’m sorry, does the singlet offend you?’
Ha! My eyes help themselves to a rove over it, just for accuracy’s sake, before I shrug and stammer out, ‘Of course not. Wear whatever you like. And yes to the road trip, I guess. Why not gallivant who knows where with a perfect stranger?’
‘Come on, we told each other our secrets yesterday,’ he reminds me, pulling off the singlet and swapping it with a dry Tshirt from the line. ‘We’re not really strangers anymore, are we?’
He told me he had writer’s block and admitted to some scandal with an actress.
I told him my show title, implying the love of my life died.
Our secrets aren’t equally weighted. ‘You can tell me more about your musical in the car,’ he adds, and I wonder if he means the show or the torturous story behind it.
‘There’s really not much to tell,’ I say. It’s best to manage expectations, if we’re talking shop. This is an Oscar-nominated screenwriter, according to April. You can’t fudge the creative update, or he’d see right through it.
Nodding at the straps of my swimsuit under my top, he says, ‘Save the swim for Tathra? We can have lunch at the pub on the hill.’
‘You know, most people just go to grief counselling,’ he observes as we hit the highway and turn south. ‘You wrote a show.’
I tap a quick message to Rach: Heading south to Tathra with Beau. Will check in. As nice as he appears, someone should know my whereabouts.
‘Obviously a musical wasn’t my first thought,’ I say, tossing the phone into my bag.
‘It’s not like I was hit with inspiration for lyrics in the hospital.
’ Looking back, starting the show right there might have been healthier.
‘The night he died, my friends rescued me with wine and shots. I know Baileys is not the drink you think of in a crisis, but—’
‘The effects are fast?’
Practically lethal in the quantities they dished up. Alcohol caused the propulsive eradication of thoughts I couldn’t face. Of fresh memories I wanted to unsee. And that one last, unspoken goodbye, the lack of which haunts me to this day.
‘What I really wanted to do … should have done … was sit at the piano. You’d get this, as a writer. Every thought had to be expelled through my fingers on the keyboard. The music I made that week! I’ve never been able to replicate the depth of it. It was as if I bent time.’
He focuses on the road, giving me the floor.
‘That group of friends isn’t particularly musical. I think they thought I was properly losing it.’
‘No, the opposite,’ he says, getting it instantly. It’s such a relief.
‘Before Fraser died, I’d half composed a piece for his fortieth.
The rest of it came out of me in a fully formed rush, after absolutely no sleep.
I played it at his funeral. You know those times when you’re completely in the zone and the creativity doesn’t feel like it’s coming from you, it’s coming—’
‘Through you.’
Yes! It’s been years since I’ve spoken to someone on this same wavelength; it’s as disconcerting as it is hugely welcome. ‘There was something about that music, having straddled both his life and his death. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done.’
He turns the stereo off, easing back on the accelerator as if to prolong this journey and make more space for the conversation. ‘Do you ever wonder if what you’re making already exists in the future?’ he asks. ‘You’re just pulling it into your present reality?’
This theory slots seamlessly with Fraser’s, it almost feels as if Beau is delivering a message from him.
I rub the goosebumps on my arms. But if the idea is true, that means there either is or isn’t a whole body of music existing now in my future.
I shiver at the notion that there might not be any, that I might stagger on like this forever and never really write again in a way that I’m proud of—the headline-making, knocking-it-out-of-the-park stuff I know I can do if I just reach for it again.
‘Play it for me?’ he says.
‘Fraser’s song?’
The request triggers a shock wave of stage fright.
‘It’s really not a road trip kind of thing.’ I can’t taint it, having it play over the drum of the engine, while we pass semitrailers and grey nomads and road signs that say, Wrong Way Go Back and Road Works Speed Limits Enforced.
‘I had a complaint once from a neighbour. A note slipped under the door of my apartment after I’d been playing it on loop at top volume, sobbing. All I’d wanted to do was roar the music, bloodletting my agony through the notes. Do you know what I mean?’
His eyes are firmly fixed on the road as he nods.
‘The note was in all caps,’ I tell him. ‘STOP THAT FUCKING RACKET.’
Beau lifts his foot from the pedal instantly, as if he’s been personally assaulted by my neighbour’s ruthless insult.
Next, he’s swinging off the highway onto a side road covered in thick shrubs.
He takes a sharp right, down a dirt track that the ute gobbles in a way that thrills my inner adrenaline junkie, but I’ve got Sara’s voice in my head, concerned about our sudden change of direction.
I clutch the door handle and say, ‘You’re not a murderer after all, are you? ’
‘Trust me.’ He is focused on the bumpy four-wheel-drive track until eventually we arrive in a deserted dirt car park at a headland overlooking the ocean, the ute coming to a stop in a cloud of dust that clears over a breathtaking vista of endless blue.
I imagine we can almost see all the way to New Zealand.
‘How did you know this was here?’ I ask, unclasping the seatbelt’s latch and leaning forward.
‘Scouted every lookout up and down the coast for a film scene.’
Ah, that’s right.
‘I don’t mean to brag, Hepburn, but this vehicle has nineteen speakers.’
He passes the auxiliary cable while the ocean crashes on the rocks beneath us and I look into his steady, patient gaze.
I’ve never heard Fraser’s piece outside my own living room and in the chapel at his funeral, or while playing it hundreds of times through headphones at a volume so loud it’s probably damaged my hearing.
I recorded two versions. The one I sent to Josh, drunk, the night I wrote it, and a more refined example for posterity, which I tried to record sober. The former has my heart.
My fingers shake as I plug in my phone and fumble to the private SoundCloud account, hovering over the play button while Beau waits patiently for me to summon the courage I need to share this.
At the funeral, I was desperate for the tune to sink deep into everyone’s heart so they’d get it: Can you feel it? This is what he meant to me!
Do I need Beau to understand that, too? To see how deeply I have loved. To know what I’m capable of in this department. Emotionally? Musically?
It’s not just about Fraser. It’s that half terror, half thrill of handing someone an example of what you can do and who you are as an artist.
He seems to take my uncertainty and instinctively understand that this would be easier if we weren’t trapped inside a small space.
He dials the volume to max on the stereo, opens his door, walks to the front of the ute, gives me a hint of a smile, then pushes himself up on the bonnet, swinging to face the ocean.
I stare at his broad back and shoulders through the wind-screen. I don’t even know this man, but without looking back at my phone, I press play, pulse racing.
The usually soft introductory bars belt through his speakers and grow into the first three lines as I listen to the familiar melody, in an unfamiliar way. Beau tilts forward and rests his elbows on his knees as I open my door.
When I reach the front of the ute, I realise he’s not staring at the waves at all.
He has his eyes shut, listening. Salt spray whips my skin, and strands of hair blow wildly across my face as I push myself up beside him.
Fraser’s piece soars while the bonnet vibrates with the music beneath us, the wind carrying the notes, scattering them, like ashes, from this cliff.
I place my palms flat on the warm metal of the bonnet, the rhythm pumping into me and through me like a thumping heartbeat, working up to the crescendo I know is coming, the one that always makes me want to scream, though I never have.
You can’t let yourself go like that in a city apartment.
You’d have the authorities on your doorstep.
It’s like Beau isn’t even here. Suddenly I’ve kicked off my shoes.
I’m pushing myself to my feet, standing on the bonnet now, barefoot, music thundering through my soles, coursing up my legs and through my body, dress flapping against my thighs, hair flying, trapped grief surging, unleashing, while I sense the noise raging through me …
up, up, up … and finally belting out of my mouth in a scream that doesn’t sound like my own, and will never be too much, or too loud, because we’re a match now—the wild ocean and me.