FRASER
Two weeks later, a packed audience floods into Llewellyn Hall as the orchestra warms up, the cacophony of notes matching my mood. Parker squirms beside me as I flick through responses to an ad that I placed for someone to help me juggle it all. Here I was thinking I was Superdad. Turns out I’m about one overseas conference away from blasting through Maggie’s patience for tweaks to the custody schedule.I also have a life, Fraser! This unpredictability makes it very difficult to move on!
‘When will we see Uncle Josh?’ Parker asks, kicking the seats in excitement.
‘Your uncle is the guest of honour!’ Mum explains, on the other side of Parker, loudly enough that the people in front might divine the family tree and forgive the thrashing they’re receiving from Parker’s patent Mary Janes. ‘He’ll be the last onstage.’
‘Because he’s the most important?’
‘Yes!’
God, it’s unbearable.
Growing up, there had only ever been room on Mum’s pedestal for one. I was forever trying to get her to notice me. Being made to wait when I tried to show her my latest science project or wanted to share some laboriously detailed fact about space or geology or physics. Invariably, she would be lost inJosh’s music.Right brain creativity is so fragile, Fraser. Don’t interrupt. You don’t understand …
Ten-year-old me had wanted to understandeverything. I’d jumped on my bike and pedalled off to the library to look up brain hemispheres. Maybe if I tried very hard, I could learn to be less logical and more imaginative, just like she wanted …
‘Without the musicians, Uncle Josh would be staring at a wall in silence,’ I point out to Parker now, suddenly grateful she is an only grandchild. ‘Everyone’s equally important.’
I sense Mum’s glare over the top of Parker’s plaits as I despair of the applications in my inbox and flick through the glossy program for the concert in honour of ‘acclaimed conductor Joshua Miller’s triumphant return to Canberra’. It’s been a succession of international awards and never-ending fanfare since he first picked up the baton, precociously gifted, as a teenager.
I love my brother. I do. I spent my whole childhood trailing behind him, trying to keep up with him and copy him andbe him. The little brother in me is genuinely proud of his stellar career. But it’s always been a complex dynamic, this competitive admiration—Josh in the spotlight, me in the lab. The edges always singed with envy, Mum square in the middle of us, brandishing the blowtorch, Dad unfailingly busying himself to avoid the confrontation that might have levelled things out.
The orchestra falls silent, the concertmaster rising to her feet to tune, before Josh appears and the performers stand, followed by the entire audience, who break from tradition, clapping wildly and cheering, as he strides to centre stage—the Harry Styles of the classical scene. Only my brother would command a standing ovation before he’s done anything. He’s taken classical music and branded himself as some cavalier, rule-breaking, boundary-pushing, viral-reel-making genius, and his followersare mad for it, pushing him onto musical charts and lists of romantic eligibility.
As he takes a second bow, he catches sight of us near the front. Winks at Parker, who squeals at the personal attention. Smiles at our parents, his hand on his heart when he gestures at Mum. Then he locks eyes with me for a disconcerting extra second and nods.You’re here. In my audience again.
The concert hall hushes, the orchestra motionless while Joshua gathers himself, settling everyone into a state of delicious expectation as if he’s waiting for the heartbeats of everyone in this room to synchronise with his. Only once we’re completely under his spell, barely breathing in fear that we’ll disturb the magic, does he lift his hands.
I used to mimic these theatrics at the dinner table when we were boys, and I was sent to my room for it, repeatedly. My daughter is doing that now, hands waving fluidly in her seat, imitating her uncle. I reach across to hold her still, only to meet Mum’s double standards and disapproving frown.She’s okay, Fraser. You need to relax.
Towards the end of the second half, a flicker of movement draws my attention to the stairwell across from our aisle. She is standing there, transfixed.
This woman is no longer the ice-wielding warrior I met at Zoe’s party. She looks like crystal glass. The kind he could shatter with the gentlest tap of the baton. She is translucent. Fractured, in a way that is difficult to reconcile with the sheer force of her the other day.
What did my brother do to her?
Suddenly, the music plunges. Undulating. Surging. Pace increasing, crescendo rising, and I don’t need visual evidence toknow he has sensed her in the wings. There’s a virile athleticism in his every deliberate move as he wrings an emotional depth out of that orchestra that floors me.
And clearly impresses her. Face alight. Eyes bright. Same spell cast over Audrey that he’s always cast over Mum. If I were a poet and not a scientist, I’d say he was siphoning the music directly from her soul. Some secret, vampiric alchemy, understood only by the right-brained …
But then he breaks her. Or so it seems by the look on her face when the music stops.
The audience, leaping to its feet, erupts into a spontaneous explosion of wild applause, save for the arts critic seated a row in front of us, who is scrawling furiously in a notebook.
My brother, savouring the moment, finally turns to face his muse, skin flushed, dark eyes flashing with exhilaration, body seemingly coursing with the thrill of having conquered the room, or one corner of it, yet again.
What he’s incapable of seeing with the stage lights blasting into his face, or even without them, is the way that she crumbles. Once he succumbs to the demand for the inevitable encore, Audrey throws her weight against the swing doors and flees into the atrium. And I don’t care who I’m about to disappoint or what concert etiquette I’ll break; I clamber over Parker, push past my parents’ knees, distract the music critic, disturb the energy of the Cult of Joshua, and steal one final backward glance at the stage.
For possibly the first time in my brother’s illustrious career, he misses a beat.
And I tear out after her.
7
AUDREY
In retrospect, I did not need to witness that. That shimmering burst of Joshua in his prime. Nor did I need to observe the way his genius escaped from the bottle the second he saw me—over a decade of distance dissolving instantly, exposing the uneven entanglement that I remembered.
