‘I’m a singer like my mum. They didn’t approve of her profession.’ I study the grubby streets and wonder how something like singing would be disapproved of. What profession were her parents in that singing was so bad? I had pictured them as snobs living in a big mansion and demanding my mum become a doctor.
And then the green door swings open.
An elderly man whose clothes appear too big for his scrawny frame fiddles with the lock. He takes us both in. His glare sharpens. ‘You lost?’ His accent sounds the opposite of the Queen’s.
Words become butterflies in my headspace.
Jacob answers for me. ‘We’re looking for John Miller?’
‘Who wants to know?’
An umbrella pops open inside my chest.
This man is my blood, yet he doesn’t resemble me or Savannah. We can’t take after Maestro’s side of the family, because everyone says we both look like our mum.
‘It’s hard to explain,’ answers Jacob. ‘This is his grandchild – Astrid. Her mum was Veronika Miller. But we live in Australia . . .’
The man’s inspection pierces me now. He begins to smile. ‘Veronika’s child? I haven’t seen Veronika in maybe thirty years. We used to live on the street behind ’ere, back then. She went to school with my Debbie. You’re the spit of Veronika.’
‘So you’re not John?’ continues Jacob, because I still can’t speak. I’m not sure why, but I’m relieved he’s not John. I glance around, now knowing Mum was here, perhaps playing on this square of pavement that I’m standing on. I squint at the windows again and imagine her singing and passers-by listening to her voice. Nothing about her childhood was glamorous.
‘John and Esmeralda moved not six months ago. To Cambridge. John’s brother died and left ’im some money. I’m Tom.’ He offers his hand.
Air that I hadn’t known I was holding in rushes out of my mouth. And he’s reminded me that my grandma’s name is Esmeralda – very exotic. I shake his hand.
‘I have an address for them. We forwarded their mail. I can’t believe ’ow much you resemble Veronika.’ All his previous wariness has been replaced by nostalgia. ‘I was just off to get some milk, so I can’t invite you in for tea, but I’ll get that address.’
When he goes back inside Jacob gives me a thumbs-up. I can’t decide if I’m happy with the lead or not. Being here, where Mum grew up, is confronting enough.
Jacob pulls out his phone, jabs at the screen with his finger. ‘Shit. It’s nearly two hours by train to get to Cambridge because there’s a bus replacing part of the route – repair work. And that’s if we make smooth connections.’
‘Your audition,’ I say.
‘It’s not till five-forty-five. We can still make it.’
‘But what if we can’t get a train back when we need to, or there are delays? Or the bus is full? Why don’t we go tomorrow?’
‘We fly home tomorrow.’
‘Not till the evening. Or I could write to them.’
‘You’re stalling. You’ll just change your mind. Your dad had us up at frigging early-o-clock. It’s only like nine-thirty now. We’ve come this far. Let’s just do this.’
Neither of us has noticed Tom standing in the doorway again. He holds out a ripped triangle of newspaper, the address written in thick black pen. Jacob pockets it with a thanks.
‘You can drive in just over an hour. There’s a car hire garage five minutes that way.’ Tom points south along Broccoli Street.
Jacob glances at me. ‘Then we’d definitely have time.’
I scuff at the pavement.
‘You must visit ’em,’ says Tom. ‘It’d make ’em so happy. After Veronika left, their life became very empty.’
‘I was told they threw her out.’ My voice sounds weak and rumpled.
‘You were? I didn’t know ’em that well, but I knew ’em well enough to know they would never do that. They were very proud of ’er.’
‘So maybe there’s more to the story,’ says Jacob. ‘Let’s go find out the truth.’
Green fields roll past as we speed up the M11 toward Cambridge. If my grandparents didn’t throw Mum out, why were they estranged? Why didn’t Mum open their letters? Why have I never met them?
We hired an automatic car so Jacob could drive with his cast; I’m too tense to drive. He’s put the radio onto a classical station, probably for me. It’s only 10.30 am, so we have plenty of time.
‘Do you want to talk, or do you want to think?’ asks Jacob.
‘I don’t know. A bit of both?’
Jacob remains silent for a few seconds, then glances sideways at me. ‘I’ve been wondering. I hope it’s okay to ask. But how did your sister die?’
‘Meningitis.’
‘That’s rough. I mean. Wow. So it’s unlikely that’s how your mum died. Funny how the articles on Google say she withdrew from public life, rather than saying how she died.’
‘You googled my mum?’
He shrugs. ‘I was bored.’
‘I asked Maestro about that once. He said he announced her death as a withdrawal from public life because he wanted to spare Savannah the media attention. Back then, the press dogged him and Mum a fair bit.’
‘Odd her death didn’t get leaked to the press, but I guess it happens.’
The longer the journey takes, the more this feels like an audition – to be a granddaughter. My blood buzzes in my veins. My skin turns clammy. Like a vine, a thorny fear grows from the pit of my stomach and up around my neck.
‘No. Stop. I can’t do it.’ The words clatter out of my mouth.
‘It’s okay. I’ll be with you.’
‘I’ll write to them when I get home’.
‘You’re just scared of being rejected.’
But this is worse than stage fright. I clamp my hands to the dashboard. ‘No. Please stop. Please turn around. I’ve changed my mind. They don’t even know I exist. They don’t approve of singing as a profession. They threw Mum out. I’m being disloyal to my mum. They’re not nice people. And what if they don’t know their daughter’s dead? Maestro will be furious. And your audition.’ Words catapult over and through each other as they fall out of my mouth and I’m suddenly sobbing.
The car swerves, skids as Jacob tries to take an off-ramp too late. His arms straighten on the wheel. He pumps the breaks. The hand with the cast slips off the wheel and we swerve again. We’re going to collide with a huge service station sign. The tyres screech. The car slides askew. I slam my own feet on where the brake pedal would be, were I driving.
There’s the squeal of breaks behind us. I whip around. A truck is bearing down on us.
‘Shit,’ yells Jacob.
The smell of burning rubber clogs the air. My head whips back and forward when the truck hits the corner of our car on the driver’s side. We spin sideways and slide toward the sign.
19
Jacob
I brace myself on the steering wheel for the impact. My broken hand twinges. The truck hits the back of the car on the driver’s side so the car skews. I pump the breaks but we’re sliding sideways and breaks can’t stop us. We’re going to hit the sign. No avoiding it. My stomach somersaults. I think about the boys in the van, and wonder if it felt like this for them too. Suddenly, I’m grabbing at ways to get out of here, sure I’m not ready to die. Sure I must protect Astrid.
Panic is like a fishhook being pulled through me, snagging on every organ in its path.
The noise of the collision is as loud as a gunshot only it’s a bigger, dead-sounding thud, then a crunch of metal. And the clap of the side of my head hitting the driver’s door window is dull and hard. Pain spikes through my skull as the window becomes a spiderweb of cracks.
Skittles’s face. Mad Dog. JW. Callum. Emery. They line up.
I don’t want to swap places with them anymore. I want to live.
I want to sing. I want my voice to affect people like it did in Vienna. The thoughts come so fast they knock each other over. I want to surf the ocean just as the light of a new morning peels back the night. I want Astrid. When she smiles at me it feels like I’m tripping over and falling into her eyes. I want that every day. Before I look over at her, I glimpse a blurry image of the truck narrowly missing the railings ahead.
Astrid’s watching the truck too. The urge to hold her – but my limbs are too spongy to move. I want to tell her something – that she’s important to me. That I want to be a better version of myself when I’m around her. But my brain won’t link to my mouth. My heart pounds at my ribs and I think I hear Astrid’s heart thudding too, and maybe she can hear mine so our hearts are like drums sending signals to each other.
The air smells snappy: metallic and smoky. It layers my throat. Something warm and wet trickles onto my cheek and I push my hand against the throbbing where I hit my head, pull away a palm covered in blood.
‘Are you okay?’ Astrid’s mouth seems wide, like she’s shouting, but I can barely hear her. Her face twists and she’s screaming. Is there another truck? Another collision coming? Are we going to die?
Hushed words. Whispering footsteps. The smell of bleach and carpet cleaner and half-dead flowers combine in my nostrils. My mind scrambles for a solid memory, but it can’t get any traction, like shoes on ice.
A hotel room. No, a hospital.
The ghosts of Purple Daze rush at me. My eyes zip open. But there’s no Mad Dog or Emery in the room. It’s not even Astrid staring down at me. It’s Harper.
My quick intake of air hurts my skull.
‘Jacob. You’re awake. How do you feel?’ She places her hand on my forehead. It’s cool, but callused as usual, thanks to hours of tennis practise.
I split my dry lips to speak, but my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth.
‘Are you in pain? Nod once for yes.’
I grin. ‘Dumbass.’
Harper leans closer, her long hair tickling the inside of my arm. ‘You’re back with us then. As witty and entertaining as always. And your vocab has improved.’
But her hair isn’t auburn.
‘Where are we?’ I ask.
‘London, dummy. Maybe you do have brain damage.’
And maybe I do. Because I can’t stay awake. And I dream of Astrid.
I’m aware of conversations happening around me, the smell of instant coffee, beeping machines, nurses lifting my arm, but I can’t pull myself out of sleep for long. They must’ve sedated me. Or maybe I don’t want to wake up – because where’s Astrid? I remember the car crash. She was fine. But did we get hit by another vehicle? All I know is I want to be with her. She has to be okay. The thought of her being gone makes it feel like the ceiling just dropped on me. Maybe I love her.
Later, I hear Doc Bell’s voice. I fight to wake up.
‘Thank God,’ Doc says in a low, dawdling kind of way. The room’s dark. I can’t even make out his shape. But then I grasp that my eyelids are as heavy as bags of sand and are actually closed. He sniffs twice. ‘I nearly had another empty bed in my house.’
Nearly. Astrid’s alive.
The doc suppresses a sob. I hear him slump into a squeaky chair next to me. He mumbles something I don’t hear the start of: ‘– would serve me right for trying to separate you.’
The next morning I sit next to Astrid’s hospital bed, holding her hand while we wait to be discharged. It feels like we’ve been here for days, but it’s only been overnight. I touch the three bumpy stitches on my head. I have a concussion and Astrid has severe whiplash, and mild concussion. Before I’d passed out in the car, Astrid had been screaming because my face and hand were covered in blood, not because another vehicle was about to hit us.
Astrid’s face shifts to grave. ‘You missed your audition. Maestro says my first words when I woke were, “Did Jacob miss his audition?”’
I’m not upset about the audition even though I wanted to move to London. Things have changed; Astrid doesn’t live in London. ‘That’s not important. It’s Lilliputian, as Callum would say.’ I’m surprised to find that a random band memory doesn’t have me sinking into a gloomy mood.
Her face creases even more. ‘I’m so sorry. It was all my fault.’
‘No, it wasn’t. I probably shouldn’t have been driving with a cast.’
‘But I made you panic. You were only trying to get us off the motorway because I lost it.’
I squeeze her hand. ‘Let’s hear you sing wearing a neck collar.’ I flick the soft collar, then let my fingers trace down her arm.
Her chest rises in two short beats.
She covers her face with splayed fingers. ‘How is it possible that music and magical ball gowns and opera houses and the Tower of London can exist right next to car accidents and dying during childbirth? Sometimes the world scares me.’
I peel her hand away from her face, kiss her fingertips, certain that I want to be with her. But her expression changes to stony.
She pulls away, nibbling on a cuticle. ‘I met Harper,’ she says, flat.
‘Oh.’ My gaze fumbles in hers.
‘Maestro introduced us. You were asleep. She’s very pretty. And confident.’
I crack my neck. ‘I guess.’
‘She must love you – to fly out from America.’
‘That’s not true. I mean – not like that. And she wasn’t in America. She was only across the channel in France for a tennis thing. She planned to surprise me by dropping in overnight. It’s the kind of thing she can do. Money isn’t an issue. And she had a gap in her schedule.’
‘But still.’
‘But still nothing. We met when we were five. We’ll always be friends because her family are basically my adopted family. Besides, she’s in love with someone else.’ I lean forward and kiss Astrid on the nose. She pulls away, lays her arm over her face.
Sunshine leaks through the edges of the blinds. Shafts of light sever each other.
My words collide in my mouth. I dig through them, for the right ones. ‘When I woke in the hospital and Harper was there, I straightaway thought, Where’s Astrid?’
‘Because you didn’t know what happened to me.’ She speaks into the crook of her arm.
‘It was more than that.’
She lifts her arm. ‘You’re only not together because she loves someone else.’
We survey each other, ready for combat. I open my mouth to retaliate, but this is the last place – and moment – I want to argue.
And what if she’s right?
‘Nothing can happen between us, Jacob. You’re not over her, and . . . and –’ Tears pool in her closed eyelids.
‘And what?’ I ask, frustrated.
‘I nearly died yesterday. So did you. Death is around every corner. I won’t survive losing anyone else that I love. I won’t.’
Her expression challenges me to contradict her, but I can’t. Death does seem to stalk us. But she dropped the L-bomb. Is that what she feels for me?
‘If you were granted one wish from the Genie of the Lamp,’ I say, unwilling to give up yet, ‘what would it be?’
She turns her face away.
When it’s clear she’s not going to answer, I say, ‘Mine would be this: when you kissed me in Vienna, I wish I’d kissed you back.’
After the hospital discharges us, Astrid and Maestro return to the hotel to pack for our flights this evening. I have lunch with Harper – how can I not when she came all this way? In a pub in Leicester Square, she asks for a re-enactment of the whole accident and I oblige.
‘If there’s anything between you and Astrid, I hope my coming here hasn’t caused a problem.’ She picks out the tomatoes from her steak salad. She’s hated raw tomatoes since I dared her into a cherry tomato-eating contest maybe ten years ago. It ended i
n her vomiting. ‘I can reassure her I’m nothing to worry about. I’ll tell her you’re basically my adopted brother –’
Our eyes touch, then ping away to view the street out the window.
She adds, ‘Have you spoken to your parents?’
‘Astrid’s dad phoned them last night. He gave them all the update they needed in between court cases.’
‘Should you be flying with a concussion?’
‘Probably not. We’d have to stay another week or more to be sure the symptoms won’t worsen on the flight, and Doc can’t do that. It’ll be fine. I have strong pain pills. Astrid’s concussion is really mild. It’s whiplash that’s bothering her.’
‘I called Aria. She was on a flight from New York to Rome. By the time she landed we knew you were fine. She has a performance tonight. Principal second violin. She sends hugs.’
As Harper talks, her million-dollar smile doesn’t set my body alight, and when she loops a twist of chestnut hair and sucks on the end, it doesn’t send me into a tailspin as it used to. I don’t even mind her calling me her brother. But when she massages her neck, I stop myself from reaching out to do it for her. Old habits die hard. She tells me stories about the circuit but I drift into a daydream about being in my studio, working on songs with Dex and Astrid. I’d rather be there with them, than here with Harper. Perhaps I am over her.
But if Harper leant over to kiss me, would I turn away?
I focus on my shepherd’s pie.
‘So I have news,’ says Harper, interrupting my thoughts. ‘I’m buying a house in Florida. I spend half my life there anyway, and the long flights back to Sydney are exhausting.’
I drop my fork, my appetite gone. If I’m so over Harper why do I feel like she just dropped a bomb on me?
‘I’ll probably only come back once a year for Christmas and the Australian Open from now on.’
I gulp down my beer in one go. A part of me wants to cry. Astrid’s right – we have to keep it friends only, because I’m pretty likely to hurt her. Break her. Ruin everything. Like I always do.
The Astrid Notes Page 12