I groan and sit on the side of my bed, elbows on my knees, head in my hands.
God, what a mess this has become.
I’d walked in yesterday to find Audrey and Parker on the lounge with the puppy, Betty, watching YouTube clips of various women composers, adding new favourites to a Spotify playlist. I hadn’t thought it possible that someone could convince my childthere’s more than one woman in the world who’s making music right now. But there she was, propped against Audrey’s shoulder, fangirling over Whitwell and Wallen and Wolfe instead of Swift.
I’m really not great with children, Audrey had warned before we began.I’d be a bad influence …The reality is I’m pacing the floor now, wondering how we ever survived without her, terrified of the day she announces she’s leaving because she’s freshly employed in some reliable job she’ll hate, because she can’t quite trust herself to risk music.
As I tread quietly down the stairs, I run my hand along the rail to avoid flicking on the light and waking her. Of course, as I reach the landing, it’s clogged with her clothes, despite the coat hook being only a foot away, so I hang the jacket and drape the scarf, only for the faded hint of her perfume to catch my breath.
It’s the darkness. If you can’t see, your other senses are heightened. Why else would I be at the foot of the stairs at two in the morning, tormenting myself with her scent?
In the kitchen, I fill the kettle and think back to the insinuation Maggie flung at me last week, which I fiercely denied.Either you’re interested in this woman or not, but either way be careful. Parker has had enough disruption already.
Audrey is not a disruption. Over the last few months, she’s become the edge. So much more than a flatmate.Less than what? My partner? Parker’s surrogate stepmum?
‘All I’m saying is that everyone could do with some certainty,’ Maggie said. She included herself in that, I think. And my sleepless night is doing no favours for the counterargument I made: that there is nothing going on here, because Audrey’s interests lie elsewhere. I saw that at the concert, no matter how platonic their history might have been.
Minutes later, the kettle clicks but so does the light switch. Audrey appears in soft-pink short pyjamas, pulling the panels of some flimsy cardigan tight across her chest, and I have to focus on the rising steam in an attempt to clear my thoughts.
When I look back, she’s regarding my non-professorial attire of flannel pants and white singlet and perhaps my uncharacteristic state of deep confusion at the kitchen bench.
‘Nearly fell over your coat,’ I tell her. ‘I hung it up.’
She smiles. ‘Why don’t you write that into your rule book?’
‘You never read the rule book.’
There’s a beat of silence.
‘Tea?’ I offer.
‘Toast,’ she requests.
‘Cinnamon?’
‘I haven’t had that since I was a kid, Fraser! Yes!’
‘Audrey, can we talk?’ The suggestion fights its way out of my mouth and through all this small talk before I can think straight.
She drops bread into the toaster, then picks up my watch, which I left on the table. ‘It’s two in the morning.’
We stand still for a minute—she’s all bedhead and smudged mascara, and I get a flash of the unmovable evening skincare routine Maggie always insisted on, even if we were in the middle of something else.
Like this.
Audrey is not just the edge in my daughter’s life, I realise. She’s the edge in mine. The reason my mood shifts when I leave the university and remember I’m coming home not to a house with tension you could slice through, but to the sound of some new piece she can’t wait to play for me. It’s like that even if I have to step through a minefield of her belongings, strewn across thefloor because she had the idea for the piece on the light rail and burst into the house in a creative flurry.
She moves to the bench beside me now and reaches across me for the plates. There’s that scent again, softer now, as if she left the rest on her sheets. As she stretches for the crockery, the cardigan slips from her shoulder and I fight an urge to graze my lips across her skin, lift her onto this benchtop, and wrap her legs around me—
‘It wasn’t Joshua,’ she says, breaking the fantasy with a clunk.
‘Pardon?’
‘He wasn’t the one. If that’s what’s been keeping you awake tonight.’
As I look at her now, up this close and innocently concerned about my insomnia, she can be assured my brother is the last thing on my mind.
The toast pops up and she grabs it, spreads it with butter, shakes on the cinnamon sugar, and offers me a bite that I can barely swallow, before leading me to the table for the small-hours reckoning I’d proposed, hijacking it in her opening sentence.
