The Astrid Notes

by Taryn Bashford

  ‘Jacob. Nice to see you,’ says Mum as I hover in the kitchen doorway, unsure how to get away without having to make up conversation. ‘I hope Maria fed you. I only bought takeaway for two. We could split it though.’ She pulls off her high heels, sits on the bar stool at the kitchen island bench, rubs her feet, groaning with pleasure.

  ‘I’ve eaten,’ I lie.

  There’s the clunk of keys on the hall table before Dad joins us. ‘Evening, Jacob.’ He drops the Sydney Morning Herald on the bench top, the blocked headline just three words: Rockmelon Salmonella Outbreak. Two dead. ‘How are you?’

  He won’t listen to my answer. ‘Tired. Just heading to bed.’ I make for the side door to get to the studio.

  ‘Bedroom’s not that way,’ says Dad, like he doesn’t know I sleep in the studio. It occurs to me that maybe he actually doesn’t know. ‘Besides, we haven’t seen you in days. Come and sit with us.’ Dad surveys the curry Mum’s opening. ‘I haven’t eaten since breakfast.’

  I slump into a bar stool, trapped.

  ‘I’ll dish the food and we can talk in the dining room,’ says Mum.

  I make a temporary escape into the dining room, yank out a chair. I’m suddenly so, so tired. I listen to Mum moving about in the kitchen, and Dad’s shoes clipping across the hallway.

  Dad strides in, loosening his tie. ‘I haven’t had a chance to tell you, but your mum and I have accepted an invitation to use a holiday home in the Hamptons for a week. A reward from one of our satisfied clients. We haven’t taken a break since last Christmas.’

  ‘You’re telling him about the Hamptons.’ Mum places a plate of curry in front of Dad at the head of the table and pulls out a chair opposite me.

  ‘The Hamptons in America,’ I clarify.

  Mum grinds salt onto her food. ‘Eleven months since we took a holiday.’

  I hope they don’t want me to come too. ‘When d’you leave?’

  ‘Next week,’ she says. ‘It means we’ll miss your audition, but we can call and say good luck. It’s no different to saying it in person, is it? You’re old enough –’

  But I don’t hear another word because I’m back to having my soul shredded. Having them here for the audition shouldn’t matter, but somehow it does.

  Jeez, I’m not even doing the audition.

  But they don’t know that.

  Resentment simmers on the surface of my skin. I’m ready to detonate. And that never ends well for me. Dad hasn’t lost a case in six years and as far as he’s concerned, I’m one of his cases he’s obliged to work on from time to time. He won’t let a mere boy bring him down.

  ‘Jacob.’ Dad’s courtroom voice booms. ‘I said I spoke to Dr Bell a few days ago and he thinks you’re in good shape and will breeze the audition. Hence, we’re very confident in you.’ He pushes rice and meat into his mouth, chews it and swallows.

  Mum presses a serviette to her lips, says, ‘Have you got any other news to tell us? What’s happening in your world?’ She’s fishing. She knows I’m not usually hanging around the house at this time of night.

  We loved the demo you submitted and would like to invite Purple Daze . . .

  I pick up a knife and spin it in circles. Maybe I should tell them about the Met, partly because I want to shock them, partly to start an argument. But I can’t have them getting in the way of me leaving for New York. They might block my credit card, which will cover the two flights and two hotel rooms in New York City. And I had this brilliant idea to buy two flights and two tickets to the Met for Astrid’s grandparents.

  I promise myself this’ll be the last time I freeload off my parents. When I get back from New York I’ll cut up the credit card. Besides, now Mum and Dad won’t even be in the country and won’t know if I turn up at the Con or not.

  Wondering if they’d care if I went on a rockmelon-eating spree, I try a different defence. ‘I was going to ask if we could go to dinner after the audition. To celebrate. Guess now I’ll be eating alone. Again.’

  ‘Oh, Jacob, we can go to dinner anytime,’ says Mum. ‘How about we go tomorrow night – not tomorrow – we have the Goldbergs’ dinner. But I’ll check my schedule.’

  ‘Sure.’ I get up, knowing that’ll get ‘forgotten’, and push the chair under the table. ‘I’m for bed.’ Maybe I should tell them about the email, but what’s the point?

  ‘Jacob!’ Dad doesn’t seem to know how to lower the volume on his booming voice. ‘What else is happening? You seem – not yourself. Did you have something you wanted to talk about?’

  I glance toward the doorway and freedom. Dad, already bored with me, checks his beeping phone.

  ‘I’m just dead tired,’ I say. May as well be dead.

  ‘You spilt some sauce,’ Mum says, touching the tomato-coloured spot on my white T-shirt. I flinch, confused about why I’m wearing JW’s shirt. Last night I retrieved it from its safe place in a drawer. I needed to touch it, smell it, after his Instagram page disappeared into the ether. I won’t be sorry never to see the video someone shared to his page, called ‘Dumb Ways to Die’.

  Mum adds, ‘Have you seen Harper lately? Aria?’

  ‘Jacob!’ I wince at the volume of Dad’s voice. ‘I’m reading an email from Dr Bell. He says you’ve pulled out of your lessons? What the hell is going on?’

  I should’ve known Maestro would tell Dad our lessons were over. ‘We didn’t hit it off.’

  ‘That’s not good enough. We said if you failed the audition –’

  It’s time to spin a tale. I need to delay this conversation. ‘Who said I’d fail? The audition’s in a week. I don’t need more lessons. It’ll be fine.’

  ‘It had better be, or –’

  ‘Yes I know.’ I stand and begin my retreat. ‘And no, Mum. In case you didn’t realise, Aria and Harper no longer live here.’ To this day Mum doesn’t know that I was with both of them, one after the other. I pretend not to have heard whatever Dad yells at me and head out via the lounge, swiping the bottle of vodka on the way.

  I riffle through my CDs and, switching off the lights, blast Black Fast’s Spectre of Ruin into every brain cell. The drums, the ranting, the electric guitars, drive away the hurt, my parents and We loved the demo you submitted and would like to invite Purple Daze . . .

  I estimate there are only about two shots of vodka left in the bottle I swiped. I take a deep breath and then slowly unscrew the top. But I stop when I think about Dex and Astrid. Even though the deal with Doc is off, Astrid liked how I made the commitment to be a better version of myself plus she has this huge hang-up about alcohol damaging my vocal cords. And I stopped drinking for Dex to make sure he wouldn’t follow in my footsteps.

  I’ll go to the Purple Woods. They’ll never find out.

  I sneak back into the house and pilfer the bottle of Jack because two shots is never going to be enough. Dad’s explaining some legal line of argument to Mum and speaks loudly enough that they can’t hear me.

  Clutching the two bottles I jog round to Harper’s place. Then I’m hurling myself toward the river and the Mother Tree, along the path I’ve taken so often I could walk it backwards. I ache for that first moment when oblivion begins to numb my veins. I lean against the Mother Tree, a bottle in each hand, panting.

  This is gonna be heaven. I savour the sweet smell of Jack Daniels. Nearly two months since I last touched alcohol. Nearly.

  Always nearly. Like I nearly made it into the Con. Nearly got a recording contract. Nearly died on that Harley. But then I’m a lost cause.

  I blink at the surrounding trees, remembering Harper’s words almost a year ago. You have to move forward. We can’t be children in the woods forever. And it hits me that I keep taking the same path whenever the going gets tough. I balance a bottle on each leg. Their labels smudge. I swipe at the tears. What would I say to Dex if he did the same thing? I have to take a new path because
this one leads nowhere. I’m sort of proud I haven’t messed up and broken this promise. I’m not sure I’ve ever done that.

  I contemplate both bottles and know I won’t drink either of them tonight.

  I’m about to sneak the bottles back in the house, but as my foot hits the bottom step the outside security light clicks on, making me squint, and a voice says, ‘There you are. You weren’t in the studio.’

  Astrid steps out of the shadows. ‘And you left Black Fast –’ Her mouth tightens when she sees the bottles. Something imperceptible shifts, like a subtle key change in a get-it-on song to something more grave.

  ‘I can’t believe you’ve done this. Or haven’t you been caught until now? Remember the kind of things you do when you’re drunk – the Harley?’

  I raise my hands as though she has a Glock to my head. The bottles dangle in plain sight. ‘It’s not what you think. I was going to, but I didn’t.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’ Her tone’s flat and disappointed and masks every bit of fury I can see in her face. Reckon a bomb’s about to go off.

  Swallowing my own rising anger, I say, ‘Smell my breath.’

  ‘I don’t need to.’

  ‘How else can I prove it? I was about to put them back in Dad’s cabinet.’

  ‘They’re pretty much empty, Jacob. Don’t you think I’ve had enough lies to deal with in my life?’

  ‘Then why aren’t I falling over my own feet and slurring?’

  She removes her snarly expression from the bottles and puts it on me. The longer it probes, the less it snarls. Eventually, she sighs. ‘Why do you make everything difficult?’

  ‘You’d rather I had been drinking?’

  ‘You scare me – sometimes. You’re unpredictable.’ Her stare impales me. ‘Too similar to my mum.’

  Ka-boom.

  An air-raid siren goes off in my skull. A suitable answer forms and un-forms as words ricochet around my brain like bullets fired into an empty bathtub. I rub my knuckles against my head, then point at the studio where we’d spent some of the afternoon making out before Dex arrived. ‘You weren’t complaining before.’

  ‘Stop talking. You’re out of control and I’m a wreck. Maybe we shouldn’t go through with this plan. I’ve made a mistake. I should’ve listened to Maestro. I should have chosen not to love you.’

  It’s as if she reached into me and grabbed my heart, then hurled it against the wall. It’s both an ugly and beautiful moment because it hits me like a meteor shower – I really do love Astrid. And she loves me.

  ‘Operation Rumspringa,’ she continues. ‘Operation Ridiculous, more like.’

  The hole where my heart was aches.

  This is the part where I rant and rave and tell her to go because I’m a mess-up. This is the part where I get drunk, fetch my motorbike and drive into a brick wall, or go punch a branch until I break some bones.

  Stop. I’m not going down the self-pity rabbit hole.

  I’m sick of treading this path, yet I can’t figure out how to find a new one. But then I cotton on that I’m already on a new path – I haven’t gotten drunk and I’m not pushing Astrid away before she can push me away, or letting fate decide if I die or not.

  Except now I can’t work out where to go from here. But I have Astrid standing there. She hasn’t run away. She’s waiting for me to say the right words. I bet she’s got some music score going on in her head – one that’s dramatic and bursting with hope. Her heart is on the line too.

  The right words to say have to exist in a song. I plunder my memories.

  Nothing fits.

  The outside light times out and we’re plunged into darkness.

  ‘Explain to me why you wanted to get wasted,’ Astrid says.

  Using the stair railings, I pull up to my feet. ‘I need to show you something.’

  We walk to the studio side by side, but a metre apart. Inside, Black Fast is loud enough to vibrate objects across surfaces and the TV blares images of dust-covered people pulling survivors from the wreckage of a concrete building. I cut the music and point at my laptop. ‘Read it,’ I manage, before my face buckles.

  Astrid steps closer to the computer as though it might explode. It whirs when she moves the mouse, waking the screen. I hold my breath while she reads, and the breath becomes a mighty storm in my chest.

  ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘I’m so sorry.’ Her sympathy makes me feel more and more like I’ve been unstitched and might come apart. ‘It’s been an awful day for you. Did you write Purple Daze’s songs?’

  ‘No way. I’m not a great writer.’ I think of Callum, rocking on that chair to find his muse.

  ‘If they were alive, we’d be celebrating right about now – Purple Daze’s first recording contract. It’s sick. Warped. The world’s not a fair place.’ The computer screen casts blue light around Astrid, making me stop to take her in. ‘If they’d only met you.’

  ‘But if they – were here, you and I would never have met.’

  It’s as if there’s a light inside me and at the thought of never meeting her, the light switches off.

  ‘Is this why you wanted to get drunk?’ she asks.

  I nod, then add how my parents are taking off for the Hamptons, so they’d have missed my audition had I been doing it.

  ‘And despite all this shit happening, I didn’t get drunk. I’m not going down that path anymore.’

  ‘I don’t know, Jacob. Everything’s – messy. You must see that I have to be able to trust you?’ She draws herself tall again, tough as that drum claw hook. ‘Maybe we should take a break. Keep it friends only. I have to think. I better go.’ She walks around the piano. Away from me. ‘I need the bathroom before I leave.’

  Normally I’d let her go, but I’m on a new path, and it’s becoming clearer the further I walk down it. As she’s disappearing into the bathroom I push my way inside the tiny space with her.

  ‘Jacob. Stop.’

  ‘I will, when I’ve said this.’

  ‘Seriously, Jacob. Get out.’

  I put my palm over her mouth. Her eyes widen. Great start.

  ‘Yeah, I mess up.’ I remove my hand. ‘I’m not perfect. And you’re pretty close to perfection compared to me, but you’re not. I mean, you’re crap at climbing trees.’

  I think Astrid might smile, but she sends her smile away and inspects the floor.

  ‘Got my soul ripped out by Harper, lost my mates, wished I could die, but I’m not using them as an excuse to push you away. You don’t get to choose who you love. It finds you. Maybe it’s a little like talent – you don’t get to choose it and you shouldn’t throw it away once you have it. It’d be like us deciding not to sing at the Met because we’re afraid of choking.’

  She folds her arms, but at least she’s listening.

  ‘And you can’t throw me away. I love you. It’s scary to love back. I get it. But you’re one of the bravest people I know. After Vienna, I can’t imagine how you’re dealing with the thought of the Met. But you’re going back onto that stage . . . because you know you won’t break.’

  As I’m speaking, Astrid pulls in a deep breath and releases it.

  ‘I don’t know why neither of us hasn’t broken already, but what I do know is if Dex can face life both sober and positive, so can I. What I know is you’ve helped me see I must honour Purple Daze by not following them to the grave. Thanks to you I believe in second chances. And now I need you to give me a second chance.’

  I press her hands against my chest. ‘I’ve been shit-scared of ending up in a forgettable life. I used to say to the boys before a gig, “Being forgettable is worse than never having lived at all.” Kind of ironic now. But you’ve made me see that how you behave and the songs you sing are only part of it. Part of being unforgettable is being loved, while loving someone else with every stupid cell in your body.’

>   Astrid’s expression softens. ‘“Because you love me, I am unforgettable,”’ she says, quoting a lyric from her own song.

  I get down on one knee, which is pretty difficult in the tiny bathroom, and cup her hands in mine. ‘I vow to you, Astrid Bell, to never get blasted drunk again: if life sends me a crappy soundtrack sometimes, and I think I might stuff up, I’ll come to you first before I hit the hard stuff, and together we’ll work it out.’

  Her posture relaxes. She kisses my knuckles. The music score in my head crescendos and I want to pick a special song that matches the moment, but I reckon Astrid’s the only person capable of writing that one.

  I scan every feature on her face, willing her to reply with something good.

  ‘I’m not brave,’ she finally says. ‘The sole reason I’m doing the Met performance is because you’re there to sing with me.’

  ‘Good to know. Then I’ll blackmail you. Kiss me or I won’t sing with you.’ She starts to smile, but pulls it away again. I thread two fingers in her belt loops and tug her to me. ‘Push me away if you don’t like me like that, but don’t push me away because you’re afraid of not surviving whatever happens between us. Whatever happens, you won’t break. And neither will I.’

  She grips my biceps. The warmth of her seeps through my skin, and it’s oxygen breathed into my airless lungs.

  I whisper, ‘I promise I’ll try to be good enough for you.’

  ‘You are good enough, Jacob.’ A smile finally flickers onto her face. ‘Except you really need to do some laundry.’ She jabs the spot of spaghetti sauce on JW’s T-shirt.

  ‘Does that mean you’re sticking around?’

  ‘Like elevator music sticks in your head.’

  I tut. ‘That’s going to be annoying.’ We’re smiling, a little shy, yet a little surer. ‘Do I have to sing to you to get you to kiss me?’ I ask.

  Checking out the brightly lit bathroom, she giggles. ‘In here?’