Chapter 55
FRASER
‘I’m doing the right thing, aren’t I?’
Rachael and I are at my place, with the email to Audrey’s former university peers open.
She’s beside me, feet up, looking over my shoulder, leaning against my hip and arm, and I can barely keep my train of thought.
I don’t understand how this woman has been in my life all these years without my ever going to pieces like this around her.
‘We need to finish what she started,’ she says. ‘She’d want this. And after what Josh implied about the music school—we’ve got no choice.’
We listen to the rough track that Audrey recorded when she was a student, and then again to the track from Ridges’ album.
‘It’s exactly the same tune, right? I mean, it’s unmistakable,’ Rach says.
I click on the link in the email to the cloud repository of the other students’ music and we listen to the first sample.
And the next. Over and over, there are unambiguous examples of Ridges outright copying his students’ work.
Just lifting it. It’s abhorrent. And these are just the handful of people Audrey knew. He’s been teaching for thirty years.
‘I should never have stopped them from fighting this. It’s not fair on any of them. It’s only now that my own daughter is at risk that I’m doing something about it, like that evolutionary quirk that wires us to care more about tragedies closer to home.’
Rach takes the laptop out of my hands. ‘What were you going to do, Frase? Focus on this from the depths of grief? You were parenting a devastated child. Teaching. Paying a mortgage. Battling your own demons. You couldn’t have done one thing more at the time, and I won’t hear another word about guilt. ’
She starts typing something on the keyboard, and I watch as she scrolls through, then leans closer, frowns and uncrosses her legs. ‘God, look at this,’ she says, angling the screen. ‘How much research did Audrey do on this guy?’
She passes me the computer, open to the list of presenters at a conference a decade ago. There he is, presenting on the topic ‘Creative Sampling: A Critical Analysis of the Columbia Law School Library’s Music Plagiarism Project’.
I stare at her. ‘So he’s an expert in his own crime?’
‘Fraser, this is perfect. He steals students’ music, but he’s a leader in the field.
They assume what he’s doing must be within the realms of normal, because look at this—he’s an international specialist on the topic, and what would they know?
They’re barely out of high school—not even, in Parker’s case. ’
‘Like when pyromaniacs turn firefighters. Or when police are corrupt.’
Rachael is still scrolling and reading, shaking her head.
‘There are so many similar cases. Academics stealing students’ ideas and publishing them in articles or book chapters.
This one professor in the States stole his student’s medical invention and sold it to a pharmaceutical company for millions! ’
Anger stings. I’m enraged at the injustice, infuriated that Audrey never got the chance for justice when she’d been so driven for it, at the end.
‘Let’s see if the group wants to pick this up again. They deserve compensation, even if it’s too late for Audrey.’
‘Shall I open an email?’ Rachael props big plastic glasses on her nose as if she’s ready to take dictation.
‘Tell them I’m sorry I halted the case. If they’re still keen to talk, we can make a time. Let them know I’m prepared to throw money at this for legal representation.’ Maybe Josh will pitch in to ease his guilt.
She starts typing while I switch the kettle on and watch her, vibrating with the excitement of having a new project together, watching her work, all her mannerisms so familiar—the way she pins her fringe behind her ear, where it never stays, the fact that her glasses prescription isn’t quite right, so she’s constantly nudging the sky-blue frames up and down her nose to bring the screen into focus.
How she plays with Audrey’s pendant while she thinks.
All of it is as close as if we’d been living together for years, and when I imagine her on the other side of the world, it’s just … well, it’s impossible.
She snaps the lid of the laptop shut. ‘Right. That’s done. Now I’ve got a favour to ask …’ She leans beside the couch and retrieves her handbag as I bring her tea from the kitchen. Next thing she’s pulling out a white envelope and a series of small photos of herself.
‘My passport has expired,’ she explains, matteroffactly. ‘I need you to be my guarantor.’
I don’t want to be her guarantor. Everything I’ve just felt—all the rage and anger and fury about Ridges—takes a back seat in the face of this new threat.
‘Do you have a black pen?’ She’s looking up at me from the couch while I stand here helplessly, with her cup of tea in my hand.
‘I think we need to do two, but maybe sign four while you’re at it.’
Does she not know what she’s doing to me?
I put the tea on the coffee table and get a pen from the desk, sit down, and take the sheet of photos.
‘They’re not meant to be beautiful.’
She’s mistaken my expression for criticism. I turn them over and click the end of the pen. ‘What do I have to write?’
‘This is a true photo of Rachael Elizabeth McKenzie. And sign your name.’
As I do the first, my entire body seems to ache with the effort. It feels like I’m signing my life away.
My whole life.
‘My God, Fraser, you’re a sloth! What’s the problem?’
I look at her sitting beside me, all bright-eyed with the promise of Ireland, lining up her ducks. And it strikes me, terribly belatedly, that I am not one of those ducks. Worse, I am almost certain that I used to be. And I can’t let her go.
‘Rach, before I sign this …’ I put the pen down, a crystalline timeline of the next fifty years materialising, as fresh and glittering as it feels familiar. This is not an instead of situation. It’s an always was. It’s an as well. ‘Can we circle back to something?’
She’s losing patience. Keen to get this done and submitted so she can get out of this holding pattern I’ve had her in and take charge of her destiny. ‘Circle back to what?’
I clear my throat and reveal my hand, scared I’ve left this far too late, knowing she has every right to reject me, but if I don’t ask, I’ll never know: ‘Can we revisit the bit when you were my fiancée?’