‘You don’t have to explain how you arrived here,’ she said. ‘I don’t need to know. Not unless it’s going to help you.’
I was intrigued to figure out where the wheels had fallen off, having long blamed the way we swamped those drinks that first night after Fraser died. But one misjudged, completely understandable, reality-blocking binge in a crisis does not necessarily lead to this. It had to be deeper.
‘I guess I should start at the end,’ I said. ‘The moment when I thought my life was over?’
‘Start wherever feels best.’
And I wondered, where does a story start and finish, really? I read something about world wars and how we never really know when they begin. It’s often a gradual slide into conflict, the series of triggering events only obvious in retrospect.
‘I’d chosen aPride and Prejudicequote for the orders of service for our wedding,’ I told her. ‘You know that one where Elizabeth says, “I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look, or the words, which laid the foundation … I was in the middle before I knew that Ihadbegun”? It’s like that, this story. I think it really goes back to my twenties, when everything first went off the rails.’
Ali pulled her chair in and sipped her tea, in that way that some people pull chairs and sip tea that just seems to open sacred space for quiet honesty. I’d run through the order of events. The doctoral program. The scandal. Josh’s betrayal. The way I let it eat me alive. And a familiar disappointment had crawled up my frame as if its tentacles were grasping me from some underworld. A place where lapsed dreams lurk, endlessly hoping for revival that never comes.
‘I had been molten glass back then, thrust in and out of a roaring furnace, scared I would cool and solidify before I’d been properly sculpted into the shape everyone wanted.’
‘You know, Audrey, glass can be melted and reformed over and over again. It’s inherently recyclable. Even years later.’
I reached for my wine. Surprised to find that it was tea. Forgetting who I was talking to, and the meeting we’d just left. Realising for the first time that the roots of my addiction may have stretched further back than I thought and that perhaps it wasn’t too late.
‘We can hold injustice like a crutch,’ Ali said. ‘We can preserve failure as a theoretical concept. If you don’t try, you can’t lose.’
‘You mean, if I blamed my professor and my friend for wrecking my career—which they did temporarily—I was safe from wrecking it myself?’
‘It must have been hard,’ Ali said.
‘Oh, this is not the hard part,’ I answered, quickly. I wanted to rush out the rest of the story in case she thought I’d plunged myself into addiction over only that. Though that’s not always how addiction works, either. You don’t need something to have gone terribly wrong to find yourself trapped in it. I told her about the Zoom meeting. The silent phone on my desk thathauntsme. The missed calls. The accident.
‘Fraser left his meeting and ran to her, but when he was crossing the road outside the school … I know intellectually it was an accident. It wasn’t my fault. It could just as easily have been me, if I had taken that call. But, Ali, I’ve never forgiven myself.’
That’s where the alcohol had come in. Via guilt. I wasn’t helping myself get through. I was punishing my body. I was making things harder, destroying any chance to find even an atom of purity or happiness in the midst of all that loss.Because underneath it all, I didn’t deserve it.
‘It’s the driver’s fault,’ Ali said, simply. ‘Nobody else’s.’
I dismissed the argument for the hundredth time. ‘The campaign by the students to take down the plagiariser just all sort of died off once they heard what had happened. They really needed me, and my music, to make it work. I’ve never followed up on our idea to bring Professor Ridges to justice. I’m too furious at myself for folding in the face of it when it first happened.’
I was properly crying then, and I’m crying again now, pulling into the music school car park. Because this one loose end still plagues me and angers me and feels like it will forever stand in the face of my progress.
‘Don’t you see?’ I said to Ali. ‘If I’d believed in myself and argued back when this first happened, Fraser would still be alive!’
That’s when she frowned and said, ‘By that logic, couldn’t it be equally true that if you’d faced up to it then, which, given what you’ve said, would have been an enormously difficult thing for a vulnerable young adult to do, your career might have taken a different path, perhaps even taken you overseas, and you might never have met him?’
But I dismissed that. We had our timeline. Surely he and I would have found our way to each other no matter which paths we’d taken, in every single version of events?
53
FRASER
Some widowed people go through everything. Emails. Messages. Google searches. Perhaps they’re desperately seeking even more of the person they’ve lost. But I haven’t touched Audrey’s laptop since she died.
We might have been two days off getting married—what’s yours is mine and mine is yours and all that—but we still had our own lives. We all put so much in writing these days, every message is part of a giant web of communication with friends and family, questions asked, secrets shared, support given. I never felt it was my place to go somewhere she didn’t invite me.
They’re not always big milestones. Having her computer on my lap is another first. Some of the hardest moments are these little ones. Touching something no human hands have touched since hers. Something once covered in her DNA. Long gone now.
The photo on the screensaver wrecks me, for starters. It’s of the three of us on a holiday in Sydney, down near the Opera House with the Harbour Bridge and the water gleaming in the background. We’d picked up ice creams and wandered through the Royal Botanic Garden—such an innocent, happy little family, unaware of the detonation that lay ahead.
I don’t think I’d ever felt so content as I had that weekend. So filled with anticipation for our future. We’d seen a showthat night. Audrey had told us maybe she’d have a go at writing a musical again. She’d wanted to distance herself from the kind of music she’d made when she was younger, and her eyes burnt bright with ambition.
Her password is engraved in my head. I was forever encouraging her to choose something less hackable, but she claimed she couldn’t remember anything else and she was sick of trying to change it only for the computer to say the new password can’t be the old one.
