I drain my cup of tea and hug the blanket. This is why I don’t do ‘silence’。 Other mums crave these rare moments alone in the quiet when nobody’s demanding anything. But with Charlie at Mum’s in the Tuggeranong Valley twenty minutes away, the quiet just scares me. What if my grief is worse than I think? Maybe I’m distracted on purpose, and I’ve subconsciously engineered a frantic, overcommitted, hectic whirl so I can always put ‘busy’ centre stage, and grief can only ever hover in the wings.
It’s a work day. Keep it together.
I check the time and get up and rinse the mug. I’ve worked out it’s cheaper to pay for two days of long-stay parking at the airport than to get a cab or an Uber from here, and I find it less stressful than waiting around for people who might never come. I’ve got enough to worry about with my flying phobia.
Locking up, I toss my bag in the passenger seat of my trusty red Mini. My previous car had given up the ghost one day in that problem-plagued six months after Cam had died. I’d overwhelmed myself on the car sales websites that evening, wishing he was around to help me decide. ‘Just give me a sign, Cam,’ I’d pleaded. The next morning, I’d driven to the local shops and swung into a park beside an impeccable late-model, red Mini Cooper with a ‘for sale’ sign on the dash, 64,000 km on the odometer and a price tag under ten grand.
The windscreen is iced over now, but I’ll get the heater going and scrape it with a credit card. I push the start button and . . . nothing. I turn the key manually. The engine chokes, like it’s in the last wheezes of the death rattle – a sound I wish I didn’t have the experience to recognise.
My heart pounds as I check the time. It’s too late to call a spontaneous ride and make it to the airport in time. That’s the problem living in a place where sprawling suburbs weave through the bush and farmland. You can’t just stand on a street corner and hail a cab.
I have the phone in my hand, ready to break the career-limiting news to Hugh that I’m not going to make the flight, followed by unpalatable grovelling and another empty promise to be more on my game in future, when a light flicks on out the front of Justin’s place.
Hmm. Have I become the sort of woman who’d pass a virtual stranger her grenade and then beg for a second, totally unrealistic favour in the space of eleven hours?
Rhetorical question.
A message pops up on my phone. ‘Nearly here?’ It’s accompanied by a photo of a long black on a glass table in the Qantas lounge. My blood sugar plummets.
I grab my bag from the seat, close the door, lock the car and march across my front lawn, across the road, over Justin’s frost-covered nature strip and up to his doorstep. I can’t overthink this. I just knock and silently resolve to become a far less clingy neighbour upon my return from this trip. A more reliable employee, too. Just better, in several key aspects.
Justin’s house is shaped like a bunker. A rendered, grey box of a place that I’ve always wanted to snoop through. After a minute or so, I hear the bolt unlock and the door creaks open. Soft light spills out from the entry way and Justin stands there and yawns, messy blond hair, smooth skin illuminated like one of Michelangelo’s sculpted angels – in a pair of black boxers and nothing else, blinking his warm, caramel eyes.
Not already awake, then. My bad.
It’s also my bad that there’s a significant delay in explaining the purpose of our pre-dawn catch-up, while my eyes adjust to his gloriousness. It’s been an incredibly long time since I’ve been this close to a man wearing so few clothes. Particularly one with a physique like an Olympian. I was flustered enough to begin with, what with the broken-down car and the screaming travel deadline, and now I barely know where to look.
He has no such trouble himself, eyeing me, standing expectantly on his doorstep, overnight bag in hand, as if I’m about to move in. ‘Morning, Kate,’ he drawls in the low and gravelly voice of the rudely awoken. ‘Something else you want defused?’
I blush red. Again. ‘Actually, there is a small logistical problem—’
‘It’s the battery,’ he diagnoses, before I can continue. ‘Heard the engine failing to turn over from bed.’
I imagine him, starfished on the mattress in those boxers, listening to my ailing vehicle. Stop it! There’s no time to call for roadside assistance. No time for any conceivable option beyond begging this man for help. ‘Hugh is in the Qantas lounge,’ I tell him. ‘He’s probably ordering me a latte as we speak.’ I’m so churned up now, the thought of dairy makes me nauseous. ‘Of course, he sensibly lives in a high-rise Kingston apartment just minutes away from literally everything—’
‘Does he?’ Justin pulls me across the threshold into his bunker out of the cold. ‘And miss the charms of suburban life?’
I almost lunge at him. ‘I’m so sorry to be banging on your door. The front light came on—’
‘It’s a sensor.’
‘You must be exhausted from moving in yesterday.’ I gesture at the moving boxes piled high on polished floorboards all around us. It’s like he’s hauled it all in and run out of steam to unpack anything. Or maybe he ran out of time, given last night’s furore. ‘Justin, I am an incredibly desperate woman!’
He draws his mouth into a slow smile. ‘Are you?’
There isn’t a minute to spare. We cannot stand here, the only two people awake in the southern hemisphere – apart from Hugh, and hopefully our pilot – exchanging flirty innuendo about my apparent level of desperation. This is an emergency. The second emergency, in fact, of our brief and dramatic acquaintance.
‘Why don’t I give you a lift?’ he suggests.
I could kiss him. Of course, now I’m picturing exactly that, and exhibiting the social graces of my inner bookish teenager.
‘Give me two minutes,’ Justin says. ‘Pull up a box. Make yourself at home.’
6
Justin saunters down a long corridor and my trance is broken only after he’s completely out of sight. I scrabble for my phone, bash out a quick message to Hugh: ‘Car trouble. Getting a lift.’ Then try to distract myself admiring the warm neutrals of Justin’s bachelor pad. Lined up along the gallery-styled corridor are some large framed prints underneath where they’ll presumably be hung. They’re incredible landscape photographs – driftwood on the beach at sunrise, a forest waterfall in long exposure, an old tin hut in the outback with leading lines of cracked red soil. The box beside me is labelled ‘camera equipment’ and wrapped in tape marking it as ‘fragile’。
Is he a photographer, too? Oh, I hope so. I’ve graduated from my phone camera to a proper one and I’m still at the stage of being discombobulated by the exposure triangle. Perhaps he’ll tutor me.
Last night’s flannelette shirt is lying where it was tossed on top of a box of dumbbells. I pick it up, just for a second, and turn the fabric over in my hands. It’s reminiscent of two days ago, when I’d spent three hours sitting on the floor of my bedroom picking up every one of Cam’s shirts in turn. I pored over each one, searching for even a hint of Cam’s scent, hugged it, ‘thanked it for its service’， and even then I couldn’t let go.