It’s me who can’t breathe. Can’t confirm what she already seems to know, information gleaned from that sixth-sense bond they claimed, which I always tried to debunk with logic and reason.How can I destroy this woman?
‘Rachael, she’s—’ Can’t say it. Don’t need to.
There’s an aching pause between us that swallows their whole friendship. A giant void into which all their memories and future plans are vacuumed.
‘Where are you?’ she asks, after the longest silence engulfs us, the life having been sucked out of her voice, the way I can hear it’s been sucked out of mine.
Rachael now lives in an apartment in the award-winning Nishi Building, overlooking Lake Burley Griffin. She bought it because she can glimpse both the sunrise and the sunset from the balcony. Audrey called her a ‘look at the sky’ person. Rach would make the three of us visit Mount Stromlo Observatory for the astronomy open nights and go stargazing along country roads outside Canberra. I guess all of that is over now.
I’ve been to the apartment countless times before. Most recently last Friday night, when Audrey and I picked up Thai takeaway from a restaurant on London Circuit and the three of us ate it on Rachael’s balcony with a bottle of red before catching a comedy night at the theatre. Tonight, I’ve arrived empty-handed. Arms hanging loose at my sides, nothing to offer but a barbarous story about how both of our lives have been bayoneted by this tragedy.
As I wait to have Rachael buzz me in, it’s as if Audrey is standing here, right beside me, just as she was less than a week ago.That staircase is as good as half the sculptures in the National Gallery, she said, running her fingers along the wood. I can almost smell her perfume—impossible, of course—as I touch the timber plank where she did.
The elevator doors open and Rachael appears, pale with shock, in a pale green dress—shoes kicked off. It’s the bare feet in the foyer of the apartment building that gets me. That’s more Audrey’s style—she didn’t stand on ceremony. Rachael doesnotgallivant anywhere half dressed. Let alone looking this fractured. Thislost.
She steps out of the elevator into the foyer and into the blank space between us, where Audrey should be. Into silence, which should be filled with her voice. She was our conduit. She meant everything to both of us, and this feels all wrong, us being here without her as we hover beside the backlit staircase she loved, scattered timber up the walls, united in our loss.
I don’t know how many minutes go by before I say, ‘It happened outside Parker’s school. A distracted parent behind the wheel. She was crossing the road …’
Rachael looks like she hasn’t cried. As if it’s all trapped inside her. But this is what she’s like. Stoic. She’s not a crier.
‘What about Parker?’
Instant anxiety slams into every cell. I would do anything to save my child from this torture. She was so young when Maggie and I divorced, and we did such a stellar job cushioning her through that. Now we’ll have to break her all over again.
‘I told Maggie I need time to pull myself together. She’ll handle it tonight and we’ll tell her tomorrow.’
Rachael nods. ‘Makes sense. But, Fraser, it’s okay to fall apart, even in front of your child.’ Ironically, she’s all business herself. ‘You should come up,’ she announces, pressing the button for the lift. ‘You should not be alone.’
I think she means that she shouldn’t be.
The doors open and I am expected to follow her in. She calls the seventeenth floor and, as the elevator lifts, she looks at me, wretched expression on her face, a fresh formality carved between us by Audrey’s absence, and says, ‘We are not going on the balcony tonight.’
25
AUDREY
When my friends and I crash through the door at home, I fling off the worst day of my life: keys, handbag, shoes, earrings … and stride to our bedroom. I rip apart my shirt, buttons flung to all corners as I barge into the bathroom, flicking the shower tap.
I toss the shirt in the bin. I can’t ever wear it again. It’s the shirt Fraser complimented me on as he left the house this morning. The last shirt he saw me wearing. The shirt I wore as he took his final breath. My clothes are strangling me. I tear everything off, needing to be naked with my grief, and toss it all in a pile. I want to set fire to it, a bonfire of trauma that will spread and burn my whole life to the ground.
In the shower, the water attacks my sensitive skin the way it does when you’re feverish. My pain receptors are screaming. But I’m not sick. A thunderstorm of anguish has me weeping at first, my tears barely discernible from the hot water dripping onto my face, until I crash against the shower tiles, sobbing.
How could Fraser—kind, funny, loving, vital Fraser, who was soalivethis morning—possibly not be coming home tonight? Or any night, ever again. Fraser, with whom I had intended to see out the rest of my life. How can he just notexist?
I’m shaking now. It’s not shock. It’s fear. Because the idea of struggling through this without him is inconceivable. I needhim here to help me through losing him …I must be losing my mind as well.
‘Audrey?’ It’s Jess, calling from just outside the bathroom. ‘You okay in there?’
‘Yes,’ I call back, voice cracking. There’s something terribly isolating about the shower. I shut off the tap and reach for a towel. Drying myself feels like an exhausting ordeal, as if every ounce of my energy is already accounted for, absorbed in the hideous task of processing exactly what has happened.
‘Here,’ she says, passing an enormous glass of white wine through a crack in the bathroom door.
Surely I can make it through the shower without alcohol?Nonetheless, I take the glass from her since she’s gone to the trouble of carrying it upstairs. I swallow three large mouthfuls, set it down on the vanity, and stare at myself in the mirror, steam swirling around me like it’s my spirit, escaped from my body, refusing to reenter somewhere so dangerous and unstable.Threatening to join him?God, it’s as if I’m already drunk!
On the vanity, beside my toothbrush and his, is a smaller purple one. At the sight of it, the heart-wrenching loss I’ve been wrestling lights a spot fire that ignites a far more serious blaze. Parker, the stepchild I love so acutely, has lost her father. Rachael had called Maggie, who’d suggested we give Parker one more sleep before breaking this to her.
I imagine Fraser, wherever he is, trying desperately to reach us and help. Circling us. Going to Parker first, as he should. That’s his job as a father: to protect his baby. It must be killing him that he can’t. Killing him, though he is already dead—what a nonsensical thought. I gulp more wine. And more. Veins already tingling with the alcohol as it tries valiantly to ease the unsoothable.
