Shit.
‘Frase? What do you think?’
You let them go.
42
AUDREY
‘Hepburn, I’m taking my writer’s block on a road trip to one of my film settings today,’ Beau announces. ‘If you’re not frantically busy’—he glances at the novel in my hand as evidence that I am not—‘why don’t you come with me?’
It’s obvious I’ve been idling through the first weekend of my open-ended sabbatical. Having just woken up, I rack my brain for plausible reasons why getting in Beau Davenport’s dented RAM and tearing up and down the highway is not going to work for me today. But I’m coming up short.
He’s in jeans and a white singlet, pegging his washed clothes on a line under his caravan’s awning. The singlet, bunched at his waist, rises and falls as he pegs his clothes, revealing washboard abs that pull me smartly to full consciousness.
‘Is this your completed OOTD?’ I ask, pretend yawning to disguise how fascinated I am.
‘My what?’
‘Outfit of the Day,’ I explain, translating the acronym and wondering how someone as cool as him wouldn’t have already known it.
He sends me a Jonathan Bailey circaWickedsmoulder and replies, ‘I’m sorry, does the singlet offend you?’
Ha!My eyes help themselves to a rove over it, just for accuracy’s sake, before I shrug and stammer out, ‘Of course not. Wear whatever you like. And yes to the road trip, I guess. Why not gallivant who knows where with a perfect stranger?’
‘Come on, we told each other our secrets yesterday,’ he reminds me, pulling off the singlet and swapping it with a dry Tshirt from the line. ‘We’re notreallystrangers anymore, are we?’
He told me he had writer’s block and admitted to some scandal with an actress. I told him my show title, implying the love of my life died. Our secrets aren’t equally weighted. ‘You can tell me more about your musical in the car,’ he adds, and I wonder if he means the show or the torturous story behind it.
‘There’s really not much to tell,’ I say. It’s best to manage expectations, if we’re talking shop. This is an Oscar-nominated screenwriter, according to April. You can’t fudge the creative update, or he’d see right through it.
Nodding at the straps of my swimsuit under my top, he says, ‘Save the swim for Tathra? We can have lunch at the pub on the hill.’
‘You know, most people just go to grief counselling,’ he observes as we hit the highway and turn south. ‘You wrote a show.’
I tap a quick message to Rach:Heading south to Tathra with Beau. Will check in.As nice as he appears,someoneshould know my whereabouts.
‘Obviously a musical wasn’t my first thought,’ I say, tossing the phone into my bag. ‘It’s not like I was hit with inspiration for lyrics in the hospital.’ Looking back, starting the show right there might have been healthier. ‘The night he died, my friends rescued me with wine and shots. I know Baileys is not the drink you think of in a crisis, but—’
‘The effects are fast?’
Practically lethal in the quantities they dished up. Alcohol caused the propulsive eradication of thoughts I couldn’t face. Of fresh memories I wanted to unsee. And that one last, unspoken goodbye, the lack of which haunts me to this day.
‘What I really wanted to do … should have done … was sit at the piano. You’d get this, as a writer. Every thought had to be expelled through my fingers on the keyboard. The music I made that week! I’ve never been able to replicate the depth of it. It was as if I bent time.’
He focuses on the road, giving me the floor.
‘That group of friends isn’t particularly musical. I think they thought I was properly losing it.’
‘No, the opposite,’ he says, getting it instantly. It’s such a relief.
‘Before Fraser died, I’d half composed a piece for his fortieth. The rest of it came out of me in a fully formed rush, after absolutely no sleep. I played it at his funeral. You know those times when you’re completely in the zone and the creativity doesn’t feel like it’s coming from you, it’s coming—’
‘Through you.’
Yes!It’s been years since I’ve spoken to someone on this same wavelength; it’s as disconcerting as it is hugely welcome. ‘There was something about that music, having straddled both his life and his death. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done.’
He turns the stereo off, easing back on the accelerator as if to prolong this journey and make more space for the conversation. ‘Do you ever wonder if what you’re making already exists in the future?’ he asks. ‘You’re just pulling it into your present reality?’
