‘I am a failed musician,’ I confess. ‘And a failed office manager. Honestly, the least reliable kind of flatmate.’
‘You haven’t failed. Day jobs don’t foil raw talent. They just make it harder to squeeze it all in.’ His tone is professorial and authoritative, and as he accelerates across the intersection, I realise there’s something experienced and steadying about him. Then he gives me an electric jolt as he looks sideways and adds, ‘I remember the way Josh used to talk about you.’
I squeeze the seatbelt tight and restrain myself from fishing for details, helped by the car’s side mirror being tilted at such an angle that I catch the reproach on Rach’s face. It used to feel like a drug, the way Josh talked about my music. The endless quest for extrinsic validation was always my undoing. It’s why I am ‘temporarily unmoored’, as Rach kindly puts it. And to think I was once the subject of a music journalist’s headline: ‘Girl Most Likely: Meet the Teen Composing Sensation Taking the Contemporary Classical World by Storm’.
Where has that girl gone? Why am I messing around writingThe OfficemeetsWicked? Musical theatre?Josh and the rest of my classical cohort would be appalled. But there I go again, measuring my choices by what other people think. It’s hard when everyone else—Fraser, his brother, his ex-wife, Rach, even Hormonal-Chicken Jill—managed to get their act together while I squandered my twenties in a zigzagging haze of failed dreams and self-doubt, botching things so badly that I am currently living on someone’scouch.
I rub my chest, willing myself not to hyperventilate. I can’t keep living like this—on the run from my own potential.
‘Sometimes you just need a hard reset,’ Fraser says, oblivious to my spiralling, delivering exactly the antidote to it.
Was it only an hour ago that I vowed, rather dramatically, to steer clear of Miller blood?I said I couldn’t let this warmth near these wounds. This man is inextricably linked to the person I blame for my now being light-years behind my peers. Not only that, but I’m pretty sure Fraser’s ex-wife loathes me.Oh, God. It would be an unmitigated disaster …
My phone illuminates with a text from my back seat wing-woman:A hard reset from Fraser Miller sounds utterly delectable.
I let out a nervous laugh, and before he can ask me what’s funny, I pull down the window and stick my head out, letting cold air blast onto my face and hopefully blow some sense into my brain.
‘It’s this driveway here,’ Rach says as we pull into the residential street behind the ABC studios a few minutes later. ‘Thanks for the lift!’ She’s up and out of the car and halfway to the secure entrance of her apartment building before I can so much as fumble for my handbag in the footwell.
‘Wow. Is she an Olympic sprinter?’ he inquires, dryly.
There’s a beat or two of silence, during which I become aware that I am supposed to be following my best friend out of this car. I unlatch my belt, which seems to retract in slow motion, as if conspiring to delay my departure.
‘Cards on the table, Audrey,’ Fraser says, a moment later. ‘My ex-wife and I lost our heads the other day and bought Parker a puppy. We thought it might smooth the handovers if she went with her between households. Of course, in our desperation to make life easier, we did the opposite. The little devil has taken to blocking my exit from the house and feigning injuries whenever I put shoes on. I can’t bear the guilt!’
I coach myself to stay immune from this puppy sorcery. ‘Cute story, Fraser, but how do I fit into your dog’s separation anxiety problem?’
‘Oh, Betty isn’t a problem. She’s adorable!’ he explains. ‘Parker named her. Some sort of Swiftie reference.’ Then his smile fades as he says, ‘As much as my brother irritates the hell out of me—’
‘And out of me—’
There’s a flicker of surprise, as if he hadn’t expected me to pile on. ‘I think my daughter has inherited her uncle’s gift. She won’t leave the piano alone. He wasn’t kidding about that xylophone. She’s pretty extraordinary. I know all parents say that—’
‘If she’s anything like her uncle, she needs careful nurturing,’ I cut in. ‘Who’s teaching her?’
He rubs his forehead, as if soothing a sore spot. ‘She’s almost entirely self-taught. The kind of kid who refuses instruction. She’s already burnt through three teachers who couldn’t keep up.’
‘I’ve met kids like this before.’ I don’t divulge that Iwasone. ‘Sometimes they have more music in their little fingers than their teachers have in their whole bodies.’
When I look into Fraser’s face, it’s not that of a world-class scientist on top of his game. It’s that of a parent without wings trying to show his child how to fly. His genius lies elsewhere. I know that from all my snooping. If Parker is half as talented as her uncle and Fraser isn’t musical himself, he must be wildly out of his depth.
This is like that moment when there’s a medical emergency and they ask if there’s a doctor on board. ExceptIam the doctor. Or I would be, if I’d finished my PhD …
‘Audrey—’
‘It takes someone with experience to handle a Miller prodigy,’ I blurt out.Experience I can’t deny that I have, despite the way it all ended.
His brown eyes are alight in some jumble of fear and hope that my inner romantic could very easily latch on to and run away with, and I have to remind myself this is not about me at all. It’s about his daughter.
‘It wouldn’t have to be forever,’ he suggests, and I imagine an atom-sized objection floating between us, before it evaporates.
When I don’t answer, he stares at the dashboard, lips tight. ‘Sorry. I’m not usually this impulsive.’ I can see how excruciating it is for him to ask for help. ‘She’s miserable in afterschool care. Apparently it’s attended by her nemesis. I don’t know that she’s strictly being bullied, but she’s certainly—’
‘Different?’I remember this.‘I was the classical music geek at school. Lunchtimes holed up in the music room, avoiding people who didn’t understand why I was playing an imaginary keyboard on my desk in algebra, like a freak …’
The memory lashes the air before I can censor myself. I’d pushed from my mind how isolating it was, being obsessed with something conventionally ‘uncool’, trying to keep a lid on the passion as it leaked through the cracks. The thought of that little girl who rushed into his arms feeling just as lost as I did makes the car seem hot, and I peel off my jumper.
Fraser flicks the key in the ignition to let the air-conditioning flow.
