Chapter 44
AUDREY
I’ve woken before dawn to a bad case of sunburn from yesterday’s antics on the cliff, but I barely notice the pain, because for the first time since Fraser’s funeral, music is exploding, properly, in my brain.
It’s an almost overpowering synaesthesia of lights, colours, textures and tones.
Emotions I can’t articulate transform into notes, clustering in phrases, rising and falling as temperatures fluctuate kaleidoscopically in my mind’s eye, and ear, as if I’m on some powerful hallucinogenic drug.
I’m hungry to capture it all. To pluck it from the sky. Save it in audio recordings. Scramble it onto the pages of the notation paper that has tortured me, blank, for so long. I am breathless with the return of this. Overwhelmed by the prolific intensity. Terrified it will stop.
Swinging my legs over the side of the bed, I hold my head in my hands and check the sounds are still there, scared to move in case I trip a wire and the creative onslaught evaporates.
I haven’t had a rush like this since Fraser’s piece burst onto the page, so I reach for my phone and the portable keyboard, my laptop and the headphones, paper and pen, Miss Bennet instantly transformed from holiday camper to remote recording studio.
This is how it used to feel with Josh. This grappling.
Scared of dropping ideas. Frantic for every last note.
I thought he and I had brought out each other’s best. Thought my music needed his.
I never imagined that I’d be sitting here cross-legged on the bed of my tiny vintage caravan, sand on the floor, waves crashing on Pretty Beach—a world away from his glittering New York stages—with this blast of music that won’t stop.
Because I won’t ever let it. Because it is mine.
Yesterday’s cliffside unleashing of pent-up emotion liberated everything—and now there’s years’ worth of silence to fill.
By mid-morning, I’ve ripped the headphones off.
Sunburnt skin is shouting louder than the music, spaghetti straps slicing through to my bones.
I try to ignore it. Fraser would be so relieved by this breakthrough.
This is everything he wanted for me. This, and the courage to take what I write now and actually do something with it.
To risk the constructive criticism I’m so scared of, always fearful someone will steal it or tamper with it and I’ll lose it.
Josh flashes to mind. I still crave his approval but have to stop myself from sending him samples.
He’s been in New York for three years and I’ve seen him three times, when he comes home for Christmas with his family and I get invited over—not to the Christmas meal itself, of course, but something on the twenty-third so I can spend supervised time with Parker.
I can’t contact her without running it by Maggie first. We don’t want to confuse her, she explained, even though my sudden disappearance from her life will have driven fresh cuts into her much bigger loss, and I’m left following her music online—listening to her grow up from a distance.
Thinking of her, another whole tranche of melodies falls into my brain. I need to get this down, but my red raw skin is blaring.
I set the laptop down and fish around in my belongings for the body cream. How can I have lost it in a space so tiny?
Fuck, I haven’t got time for this. I fling open the door and am greeted by the sublime sight of Beau, in black board shorts, washing his caravan. Why isn’t he sunburnt? Is his skin protected by the tattoos? Don’t be absurd …
‘Wow,’ he says, turning around, dropping the sponge into the bucket, and wiping wet hands on his shorts. ‘Look at you.’
‘I know, ugh …’ I pull at the pyjama top and run a hand through messy hair. I must be a picture!
‘Look at your eyes,’ he clarifies. And I can feel what he’s seeing. This spark. This afterglow from composing and knowing what I’m writing is good, even in its first-cut, straight-from-brain-to-paper form.
These are the fireworks I promised Fraser.
He never saw the expression I can feel on my face right now.
One I haven’t felt since my undergraduate degree, pre-fallout.
This is the revival of my real, creative self having taken the long way around, as he always said I would, his faith in me stretching well beyond his death, until I’ve finally caught up with it, too.
‘And look at that sunburn,’ Beau observes, wincing at the sight.
‘Do you have any aloe vera? I can’t find mine.’
He goes inside, returning moments later with a tube of cream.
‘Thanks! Toss it here,’ I suggest, preparing to catch it.
Instead he flicks the plastic lid as he wanders over, squirting lotion into his hand. ‘Turn around,’ he commands when he meets me at the step of my caravan.
‘It’s okay. I’ll do it—’
‘Are you a contortionist?’ He waits for me to capitulate, knowing I will, as reaching the raw skin on my back is impossible.
‘Wow, how did we let this happen?’ he asks, fingers slipping gently under my straps, edging them off my shoulders carefully.
‘Well, I am a middle-aged woman, give or take. It was probably on me not to be this careless.’
I shut my eyes, inhaling sharply as cool lotion hits hot skin, and I lift my hair from my neck as his fingers brush my shoulders.
He steps closer, pulling the fabric away from my back, dipping his hand underneath it, tracing the outline of my swimmers from memory until I have to grip both sides of my caravan’s doorway.
Scorched skin, desperate for this touch, floods my brain with a swirl of conflicting sensory signals, and my heart throbs, head spinning—quite certain he’s rubbed aloe vera onto the skin of so many women it’s probably tabloid-magazine canon by now, hopelessly convinced, nonetheless, that it was never quite like this.
As if he is inside my head, extinguishing a trail of sunburn that lights a new blaze.
‘Over your writer’s block, then?’ He knows exactly what he’s doing, spinning me gently by the hip, resting a hand flat on the metal of my caravan as he leans against it, satisfied smile in his eyes.
I seem to be over every sort of block, if he must know.
The man has set me on fire in every conceivable way.
Creatively. Emotionally. Physically. And now the sounds blasting through my mind are urgent.
They’re hopeful. The melody so fresh, so unexpected, and my desire to capture it so intense, I’m almost scared of it as visions flash of the way our legs touched on that rock face yesterday.
How it thrilled me and scared me to tumble towards him like that …
‘I’ve had an idea,’ I announce.
‘You look like you’ve been ravished by ideas.’
I adjust my straps and fidget with my top and my hair, trying to straighten up, attempting not to dwell too long on the word ‘ravished’, as uttered from those particular lips.
‘Don’t do that,’ he says, nodding at my hair, taking my hand, and leading me off my step, into the space between our vehicles. ‘Frenzied creativity suits you.’
I suspect it would also suit him. I imagine him deep in concentration, perhaps with a pair of reading glasses and a strong black coffee steaming in a mug beside him while he writes.
If he’s this attractive not writing, I can’t begin to envisage the impact of Beau Davenport with a laptop, impressive thoughts tumbling into a document while he writes some award-worthy script.
‘I want to help you with your screenplay,’ I announce, not just because I really want to see him in that state. I’m eager to shift the conversation away from me and how frazzled I look, and onto him and how genuinely I want to help.
He smiles. ‘Oh yes? How would you do that?’
‘Come with me to Canberra,’ I say. Confidence has overcome me in some sort of delirious, post-creative high, convincing me it’s worth asking the eligible screenwriter, who seems to divide his time between high-rise Sydney and LA, if he would like to tag along on a trip to the nation’s capital.
‘What’s in Canberra apart from the prime minister?’
‘A rehearsal room at the School of Music, for starters,’ I explain. ‘I’m hiring one to use the piano for a few days.’
He tosses some kindling and a couple of big blocks of wood into a rusty metal drum for tonight’s fire before he looks over, catches me staring, and says, ‘Where do I fit in?’
My brain produces an instant collage of all the ways …
‘Bring your story,’ I say, preventing that train of thought from going any further. ‘Tell it to me and I’ll set it to music. I don’t mean officially—I’m sure you’ll have already locked in a composer for the actual film—’
‘Harlow and I had another email from him this morning, asking if there were any content concepts we could send through yet.’
Harlow? ‘I thought she was an actor.’
‘She is, but she’s also shadowing me in the writers’ room.
She wants to move in that direction. I guess I’m mentoring her, unofficially.
In return, she’s been helping out with some of the project-management stuff, emails and so on, while you’re off being creatively brilliant, Beau, she said.
I haven’t been entirely open with her about how dire things have been on that front. ’
His frustration is palpable, standing here, arms folded across his chest.
‘Yesterday I was just as stuck as you,’ I remind him, leading us to the camping chairs. ‘All it took was for you to let me play my piece in a new place, and that changed everything.’
‘You had a bigger story stopping you,’ he says. ‘I don’t have the same excuses.’
‘Being somewhere different could help, though. Showing a new person. Staying here hasn’t worked for you, has it?’
‘Why waste your time on my stuff?’
I pull my chair right in front of his and lean in so close he edges back in his seat, away from the wild composer.
‘You don’t understand. I’m not on a deadline.
Nobody’s waiting on me. Right now, I don’t care what I write.
As long as it’s new. If you tell me the plot of your movie, that will be just another creative stimulus for me.
You won’t use the music, but I might. And when we put your words and my music together, maybe we’ll find this elusive female lead that you’re searching for. ’
The waves crash on the nearby beach and we stare at each other.
‘I started a piece this morning, inspired by that moment on the cliff.’
He tilts his head. ‘Which one?’
I meant the one standing on the bonnet of his ute, but now I’m thinking of the one on that rock, water gushing over us while he was on top of me.
The way he never took his eyes off me, as if the whole ocean could come at us and we wouldn’t move.
The way his thigh had felt against mine, pushed into the hard surface of that rock, hot sun, cold water, delicious anticipation.
Now I shake off a shiver, which he catches.
I know he does, because he’s covering a smile.
‘I want to play it for you on a real piano,’ I say, slightly breathless. Why does it feel like I’m undressing in front of him?
He considers me carefully. ‘What are you telling me, Hepburn? I’m your muse?’
This line, he delivers deadpan, but with a sparkle in his eyes that unleashes the butterflies inside me that are never far from the surface around him. Something has crashed through the barrier that has kept me from my music all this time.
‘Maybe you are,’ I venture, scared to assign him a role this critical when our acquaintance is so new and both of us are creatively fragile. I’ve been here once before, with disastrous consequences.
He leans forward now, too, pulling on both arms of my camping chair, tipping it towards him. Like that time Fraser wrenched my chair across the floor …
My heart quickens at the idea of just how unexpectedly far I have come in three years, and how unexpectedly far I might potentially let myself go. ‘You might be my muse,’ I repeat as I reach out and brace myself on his shoulders. ‘But more importantly, maybe I’m yours.’