Chapter 46
AUDREY
The further into Fraser’s song that I play, the closer to him I feel.
When I try very hard to imagine it, it’s as though he’s just outside this rehearsal room, listening to me play the way that he used to.
As long as I keep the music going, I sense him there.
Worried that if I stop, I’ll break our bond, he’ll be gone again, and it will be my fault. It’s always my fault when I lose him.
The old voicemail message taunts me. Audrey, it’s Faith Jones from the front office at school. We’ve got Parker in sick bay. She said you’re on pick-up today, but never mind. I’ll try her dad …
My fingers slip onto the wrong keys.
Never mind?
I could write an entire piece based on that crushing voicemail alone. It’s tattooed in my brain, the number of times I’ve played it, obsessively, wishing I could reverse time, hear the message, call, and say, No, don’t phone Fraser! He’s at work. I’ll be there in five!
And then we wouldn’t be here.
The final tone reverberates off the acoustics of the rehearsal room, and it falls silent and empty. I’ve lost him now. I can’t keep even his spirit close, even when he tries.
Then, in this silence—that empty space between the end of one piece and the start of another—I realise part of me is listening for the latch on the door, imagining Beau pushing it open, entering the room with the coffee he’s gone to fetch.
Once I picture that, my body and my music ignite at the idea of impressing him.
Perhaps because of the flashy industry he works in, or maybe because, so far, he’s the only one who knows I’m composing again, and he’s someone who intimately understands what an enormous deal it is to share a first draft. So he is safe.
I touch the keyboard, fingers depressing the keys so softly the sound is barely audible, just a whisper of what’s possible.
This next step, the idea of improvising right in front of him—nothing formed or developed or polished—is more intimate again, as if the muse itself is stripped bare, mind exposed, distance closed.
And now I am all over the keyboard, exploring some sort of mashup of Fraser’s piece and a new one—melodies at counterpoint, harmonies mingling in a way that shouldn’t even work …
Just as I reach the climax, I hear the door open behind me, my heart pounding at the idea of him hearing this moment of a piece so precious and personal as it expands into something new, every part of me alight with the promise of this unfamiliar connection.
‘Did you hear that?’ I ask, on fire with the sense of possibility, a sparkle in my voice that I haven’t heard in years.
‘I did,’ someone says from the doorway, silencing that sparkle instantly. ‘And you’re still extraordinary, Sully.’
I spin around, my eyes smarting with tears.
For an exhilarating moment—because the mind plays tricks and they’re so similar in looks and because, just seconds ago, I’d convinced myself Fraser was listening outside this door—my entire being seems to lurch forward, relief washing through me that it was all some terrible mistake.
Seconds later, that same heart has to scream to a halt, brakes to the floor, as I aquaplane towards Josh.
I cannot have him in this room, saying nice things about my music. Can’t bear the thrill of Josh Miller’s compliments. Not after all this time. This man’s professional opinion was, after all, my first addiction.
‘I thought you were in New York.’
The Manhattan chic is evident. Charcoal shirt. Dark suit pants. Flash of excitement and opportunity in his eye.
‘Back for a couple of weeks for work,’ he explains. ‘And to see Parker. She’s here at the music school, as you’d know. I assume that’s why you’re here?’
My stomach sinks again. Parker is here? I can’t be near her—or her uncle, for that matter. Maggie doesn’t allow it unless she’s present, too, despite the long stretch of time that has elapsed, sober, since that woeful episode at my place.
‘How’s everything going with her?’ Josh asks. ‘Maggie tries to keep me updated.’
There was a time when I could have told Joshua anything.
How do I explain that I don’t really know how Parker is doing?
That the relationship we so desperately wanted disintegrated.
That I haven’t been teaching her piano and that our contact is so heartbreakingly infrequent that, in reality, I lost them both?
‘Sully, are you okay?’ Dark eyes roam across my face, scanning for fractures. Ironic, when some of my fractures are his.
I am not remotely okay when it comes to his niece. And he has lost the right to ask.
He steps towards the piano, and I’m served an inconvenient mental carousel filled with all the times we spent sitting together at one just like it.
I’m ninety-nine per cent convinced I need him out of here.
But that one per cent—the part of me he’ll always have a hold over, creatively—just wants to play him something first. Beau will be back any second.
Josh is the one part of my university story that I haven’t shared.
And the whole point of being here is about reclaiming my music—something that’s difficult to do around a person who was intimately involved in its disappearance.
‘How long are you going to punish me?’ he asks, reading my body language and stopping several feet away.
‘Punish you? That’s rich.’
His posture sinks. ‘You know you’re my biggest regret.’
If this man takes one step closer, he’ll tramp on the fragile flame that I’ve finally coaxed to life from the ashes of the career he torched. And I will be furious.
‘You did this to yourself, Josh. You destroyed us. I can’t ever play for you with my guard down, and I’ll never trust you around my music.’
‘You sent me Fraser’s song the minute you finished it.’
‘I was drunk. I was completely out of control.’ Why am I admitting this?
‘For some reason that’s comforting.’ He rubs his forehead as though it’s aching from years of this feud.
‘Alcohol is a truth serum.’ For a long moment, I stare at that fact.
He doesn’t know the depths of my dependency.
The chokehold alcohol had over me. The way it subdued me.
Dismembered me. Thrashed me in the shallows in its crocodile death roll until it swallowed my relationship with Parker whole.
‘For me it was a numbing serum, but I don’t need it anymore. And, Josh, where I am with my music right now—after spending so long thinking my career was over and that I had blown my one opportunity to really make something of myself—I can’t be near you.’
By the time Beau returns fifteen minutes later, I’ve just about pulled myself together. Frankly, it’s a relief to have someone else’s problem to focus on as he leans against the curve of the piano and I look up at him from the stool.
‘Right, Mr Davenport. Tell me where you’re stuck,’ I say, calling this experiment, and the morning, and my life, to order—trying, unsuccessfully so far, to shake Josh’s energy from the room.
It’s as if Beau is configuring the problem in his mind, assembling it into a set of palatable key messages that he’s nervous to drop, before he takes a breath and launches it at me: ‘The problem is that what she and I had was explosive. So the tension between the protagonists was off the charts. She was the sort of woman who lit up the sky and burnt out on impact. Dangerous, impulsive, electric …’
Four sentences into his speech and I’m sorry I asked.
It’s an eruption of information I wasn’t prepared for.
I’m one part enthralled, nine parts screamingly envious of the sort of woman who could light up Beau’s sky and his film script so devastatingly that he’s had to go all scorched earth on it in her wake.
‘Audrey?’
My face is hot. I’ve gone straight to a place of schoolgirl inferiority, comparing myself to the iridescent cheerleader who has stolen my crush’s heart while I’m in the library alone over lunch.
‘I don’t have to change the plot too much,’ he explains, unaware that my head has fallen off.
‘It’s the character. Every attempt I’ve made to change her has only watered her down.
No one is going to fall in love with someone I can’t rouse any interest in myself, as the writer. I need to start from scratch.’
Right.
‘So someone equally explosive? Or a whole other energy?’
Please say the latter. Say you want someone broken and messy, with cracks and flaws, who’ll smash into your car and stand on the bonnet of it and scream the place down.
Intense blue eyes search my face for answers before he says, ‘The character I had just worked.’
He looks as despondent as I feel. I can’t tell if he’s maudlin about the loss of the character or the woman who inspired her, but I say, ‘Tell me more?’ Because I am clearly a masochist.
‘Can’t,’ he replies. ‘I signed a nondisclosure agreement. Can’t talk about her. Can’t write about her …’
‘Can’t get over her?’ The question lopes into the room, echoing off the acoustic panels, followed by a loaded beat of silence during which our eyes meet and I almost forget how to breathe.
It stops him short. ‘I am over her,’ he says quietly.
He does not seem over her.
My hands go ahead and fill the awkward silence that follows with a few chords on the piano. The chords are not going anywhere. They don’t mean anything. They’re just noise, trying to jostle the uncomfortable truth into the corner, out of our sight.
‘Does the character change the story?’ I ask.
‘Characters always drive the story. The strong ones can survive any plot twist we throw at them.’
My fingers return to their comfort zone. The final lines of Fraser’s piece. The part of the sheet music with the strong double bars and two dots—the ‘repeat’ sign that’s sent me back over the same minorkey section over and over again …
But it won’t now; the music pulls me from the old reprise through this unexpected bridge into a major key and a bright new melody that shouldn’t work but does.