Chapter 42 #2
And suddenly there’s no music left. Nothing to hear. Nothing left to voice.
Just the waves again. And me standing on the bonnet of Beau Davenport’s ute on a clifftop while he sits calmly at my feet, as if he wouldn’t have directed this scene in any other way.
Eventually I sit again. I draw my knees to my chest and hug them. I desperately want to explain what just happened, but can’t find the words. I mean, who just stands up on someone’s car bonnet, screeching into the void?
I turn to face him. ‘Beau—’
He puts a hand on my knee, briefly, to silence me, before he looks back out to sea, at a storm brewing on the horizon.
There’s a long pause, during which every cell in my body seems to tingle and vibrate the way they used to with alcohol, now with the powerful charge of three years of emotional release.
Eventually he turns to me and clears his throat. Blue eyes glisten as he says, in a voice that aches with a disarming blend of compassion and admiration, ‘No notes, Hepburn. Not a single one.’
An hour later, the hot sand of Tathra beach stretches before us. Another cliff towers above the historic wharf, the cove fringed by a national park buzzing with cicadas, as we place our towels in a shady spot under the trees near the surf club.
‘This is exactly how I imagined my midlife crisis would unfold,’ I say, smiling.
At least I’d imagined as far as the sun and the sand …
I hadn’t ventured to the hot screenwriter taking his shirt off in front of me, which is frankly as breathtaking as the ancient wilderness framing the scene behind him.
‘You’re hardly middle-aged,’ he argues.
‘And how old are you, then?’ I counter, fascinated to know.
He holds my gaze for a second, on the verge of telling the truth. Then, eyes glinting, says, ‘I’m not middle-aged either.’
I can see that. The whole beach can see it. The man is clearly in his prime.
‘Come on, Beau, you know my age.’
‘And you know mine. It’s on the paperwork we exchanged.’
I pull my dress over my head, if only to snap myself out of blatantly staring at the elaborate tattoo of a magnificent lion roaring across half his chest.
‘Courage?’ I ask, nodding at it, as soon as I’ve freed myself from the collar of my dress, which has scraped through my hair and wrecked my ponytail. This wouldn’t happen to Harlow.
‘Sorry?’
‘The lion. Does it represent courage?’
‘Something like that,’ he replies after a beat, turning to face the ocean, but not before I notice the name ‘Lucinda’ buried in the lion’s mane. Is she the woman he’s had to write out of his screenplay? Or another woman? I’ll have to check April’s notes.
My navy one-piece is the most boring article of swimwear on this beach, beside all the neon orange and hot pink and with kids dashing around in frilly florals with big plastic floaties.
Normally I’d be self-conscious in swimwear in front of someone like Beau, but in truth I felt far more exposed screaming at the ocean, standing on top of his car, having some sort of existential spiritual reckoning.
Perhaps I’d been screaming for Fraser, as if the song I wrote for him was an over-the-waves siren call, tempting him back to me through a glitch in time.
But he didn’t come, of course. He never does. ‘Beau, thank you for facilitating that, um, that—’
‘Exorcism?’
Yes! That’s what it felt like, in retrospect.
Not a ‘calling in’ of Fraser at all. An expulsion of something else.
Grief? No, trauma. Trauma from the way it happened.
My role in it. The fact that it was my fault.
The guilt I’ve been carrying that I could have prevented Fraser’s death if I hadn’t been on that Zoom. If I’d been braver, earlier.
As raw as it was, the experience on the bonnet of Beau’s ute had felt like an epic, cinematic eleven-o’clock number—that sweeping, showstopping song that comes late in the second act of a musical, where the protagonist has some sort of life-altering personal revelation.
‘The exorcism was all you,’ he says. ‘I’ve never seen nor heard anything like it.’
I must look worried, because he tilts his head and looks directly into my face to ensure I’m paying attention and adds, ‘It blew me away.’
He starts walking towards the water, but I’m still wired from the way the music pumped through me and how it felt to expel that scream.
I run after him and pull his arm. ‘You know this area. I thought I read that there was somewhere near here where you can cliff-dive.’ He seems taken aback, but I point at the lion on his chest. ‘Courage, remember?’
‘Courage, Hepburn. Not stupidity.’
We stare each other down, and I watch in real time as his expression cycles through disbelief and worry, landing on excitement. ‘Cliff jumping. In middle age? It’s unseemly.’
I hoot at this and push his tattooed shoulder playfully.
‘Right,’ he says, taking my hand and marching us back towards our towels, which he scoops up before we head back to his car.
Moments later, he starts the engine, revving it.
His arm is on the back of my seat while he reverses, the same as it was in my Jeep the other night, and I’m staring at him, thrilled by this sudden adventure, until he catches my eye: ‘Second thoughts?’
‘No!’ I say emphatically, smiling broadly as he screeches out of the car park and drives up through the hilltop village, and towards Kianinny Bay.
If we live to tell this story, Sara will kill me.
But after the sensitive way he listened to my music, I don’t feel so compelled to update Rach as to my whereabouts anymore.
Once we’re parked, it’s only a short walk to the cliffs and suddenly my bravery is wavering, the swell rolling, ocean heaving, white foam bubbling in the dark blue depths.
‘After you,’ Beau says, on the edge of the rock.
‘Goodness,’ I respond. ‘You go.’ It’s as if we’ve collided at the door of a Michelin-starred restaurant and we’re dancing through the interaction with two sets of excellent manners.
A larger wave crashes in the water beneath us. ‘Fortiores una,’ Beau says, pointing at another tattoo on his shoulder.
‘I only did a term of Latin in Year Seven—’
‘Stronger as one,’ he translates as he takes my hand, pulls me towards the edge of the cliff, and then right over it.
We plunge into the ocean below, hitting the water hard and sinking beneath it in a thrilling burst of freezing cold, shrouded in the bubbles we’ve made, his grip on my hand tightening as we kick towards the light and burst through the surface just as another wave crests over us.
He pulls me tighter against him, until we surface into the brilliant midday light.
‘That was incredible!’ I yell, face to the sun, smile to the sky.
We power to the edge, clamber out onto some rocks and back up to our starting point, and jump off twice more, each time more sure of ourselves. It’s exhilarating.
Finally, we tire of the climb and bask on the warm rocks below, ocean breeze on wet skin, spent from all the exertion.
‘You must miss your husband,’ he says as water crashes, seagulls swooping overhead.
He is propped on one elbow now, casting a shadow across my face and a halo around his own, all sculpted muscles and tattoos and brooding, brilliant writer vibes, and I’m sure Fraser would forgive me—nay, expect me—to be distracted from the question.
‘I do miss him,’ I answer, at last, wrestling as always with the semantics, knowing the timing of Fraser’s death was the greatest tragedy of all and not wanting to elicit even more pity from this man by explaining that we were just a whisper away from walking down the aisle.
‘At first, I thought I’d never be able to breathe again, let alone …
’ I swallow down whatever I was going to say, because I’m convinced it involved the rapidly developing crush I’m fighting here.
‘Let alone what?’ he asks gently, the corner of his mouth threatening a lopsided smile.
It’s that gentleness that gets me, juxtaposed as it is with the gloriously rugged everything else …
and my eyes sweep over his face, dark hair still dripping with salt water, blue eyes intent and compassionate as I lie here, powerless to extract myself. And why on earth would I want to?
‘Beau, this is …’ Magical? Temporary? Why am I attempting to label it?
The way he’s looking at me morphs from what I can only describe as hopeful, verging into wants-to-kiss-me territory, and then into a flash of worry, brows knitted.
Perhaps he is concerned about the state of my heart?
He saw the depth of its bruises on the other clifftop.
Perhaps it’s not me he’s worried about at all, but him, and the danger of getting tangled up in any way with another woman after the last scandal.
Or maybe I’m just getting this all wrong because—look at him. Who am I kidding?
‘Is there something about clifftops that brings out the best in you?’ he asks.
I prop myself on my elbows, squinting into the sun.
‘The music,’ he suggests, tilting his head and smiling. ‘The adventure. Throwing your heart out over one, flinging your body off another. The general audacity of it all.’
Something about the word ‘audacity’ trips a wire in my brain.
It’s been so long, years, since I’ve felt bold.
But when I think about what I’ve pushed through, what I’ve survived—things I’ve told Beau already and things I haven’t trusted him with yet—maybe the audacity has crept up and overtaken me.
You think you’ve come a certain distance but find that you’re further ahead than it seemed.
I plunge us into the silent exchange of a long gaze, during which another sort of audacity springs to mind.
It would be so easy to take the lead here.
To close the gap, trace the lion on his chest, and reel him towards me, teasing him closer until he pushes me back onto the hard surface of the rock we’re lying on like this is a scene from one of his films …
But just as I’m tempted to do that, right when I feel my body tilt towards his, my knee rising and making contact with his thigh, there’s a loud bang from a wave hitting rocks, and a threatening wall of water suddenly crashes overhead and onto us as the rock becomes terrifyingly slippery and the wave engulfs us in white foam.
I reach for something to hold. But I’m on my back, the power of the sea threatening to pull me in.
I feel myself slipping, until Beau throws his weight across my body, anchoring us as he grasps a ridge in the rock with one hand, his other arm around my waist, sheltering me from the surge.
As the water drains away, every ounce of the audacity he’d so admired just seconds ago seems to rush out of my body and I soften into the hard lines of his, my face against his chest, his heart thundering.
He eases off me and helps me sit up, and we shake the water from ourselves. Finally we look at each other, stunned. As dangerous as that was, I feel sixteen right now. A light, carefree age I never thought a widow could access again. It must be magic.
‘Is that how you’d have directed it?’ I ask. ‘For your movie?’
His smile is strained as I catch him glance at my lips. ‘More or less,’ he admits, blue eyes flashing back to mine with an unmistakable edge of desire.
Twenty minutes later, we fall into the Tathra pub, physically worn out, sunburnt and thirsty. There’s a table for two near a window, and he suggests I nab it while he orders our meals at the counter before the kitchen closes after lunch.
‘What can I get you? Beer? Wine? Something stronger?’
‘Lemonade,’ I answer firmly, and because I know how this goes and want to head off at the pass the inevitable negotiations, I add, ‘I don’t drink.’
‘Lemonade,’ he repeats. ‘And the burger?’
I nod. Usually by now we’ve entered into a debate over my avoidance of alcohol: I can’t tempt you with bubbles?
What about a cocktail? Espresso martini?
I have to say, No thanks, just a soft drink, while the entire venue seems to fall into silence, because this—the not drinking—is positively un-Australian.
People can’t make it work in their heads.
‘Do you mind if I have a beer?’ Beau asks, doubling back to check, having seemingly thought of the question halfway to the bar.
‘Go ahead! Just stay under the limit unless you want me driving your ute home, and we know how that goes …’
He shudders and laughs aloud as he heads back to order, and I watch his effect on the room.
The way people turn. The smiles on the faces of the bar staff when he greets them with some invisible aura, all of them falling under his easy spell, as if he is the movie’s star, not its architect.
And when he turns and locks eyes with me again, beer in one hand, lemonade in the other, and smiles, I realise this man is stirring some long-forgotten, grief-trodden part of me.
And I don’t just mean the libido he shook to life on Day One.
Surely it’s okay for a forty-year-old to entertain a distracting little infatuation during her birthday week, even if Beau Davenport ordinarily attracts models like Harlow and presumably Tattoo Lucinda and all the other glamorous women he’s been spotted with in the social pages April has been sending me.
It’s a grief version of those ‘safe crushes’ teenage girls harbour on pop stars and film idols.
The ones that let them experiment with love without risking any real heartbreak.
What might it be like if I fell in love, post-Fraser?
He crosses the room, places the drink in my hand, sits down, and waits for me to clink glasses. Then he takes a large sip of beer, puts the glass on the table, leans in, crosses his arms, and looks at me as if Harlow and Lucinda are in the rearview mirror.
‘Audrey,’ he says, picking up the pub’s branded coaster and tapping it on the table while he chooses his words, before setting it down flat and meeting my gaze. ‘I can’t get your music out of my head.’