As the sun set, the music turned off next door. She went to the loungeroom window, pressing up against the curtains that they had picked together and that she had hemmed to length during a movie marathon whilst he had sanded back the skirting boards in the room, looking out across the front lawn they had sown together, to the other house. After a moment, the lights inside turned off, and the porch light on. He stepped out the front door, pausing to lock it.
He did not look like Owen. His hair was styled differently, and the clothing he wore… All of it she recognised having bought, or washed at some time or another, but the way it was assembled on him was somehow… different. A contrived casual dishevelment with the cuffs folded back on his jeans, collar arranged just so, buttons open to show a snug white t-shirt below. He put the keys into his pocket and strolled casually to the car, his long legs covering the distance in no time.
Where was he going? She wondered as he pulled away. But more so… How could he look so relaxed and cheerful when he had just torn her world apart? She waited at the window, frozen into place, like a caricature of a nosy neighbour. Perhaps he was just going to the shops. An hour passed, and nothing. She peeled herself away from the curtains.
She took the spare keys out of the drawer in the hall table where keys lived in between uses and let herself out of the house. She crept across the slightly overgrown grass like a criminal. Technically, it was her house, she told herself defensively trying to shake off the feeling of doing wrong. Somehow in all this, they had reversed ownership, and he had moved out into the house she legally owned, whilst she remained in the one that he did. Perhaps he had thought, as he was the one leaving, it made more sense, was more considerate, rather than move her out, but it hardly mattered, she justified. It meant that she had the greater right to let herself into the house, then he had to be there.
Even if she was doing so in order to go through his things.
She was tense as she unlocked the door and turned on the lights. But it was just Owen. If he came back, she would say she wanted to speak with him. She had plenty of reason to want to do so, after all.
How had one day made a stranger of him?
The house smelled of the renovations, glue, fresh paint, and wood-dust. It echoed hollowly as she closed the door behind her. There was no furniture in the house to absorb the sound, and the lounge and hallway floors were still bare cement. The floating floorboards were stacked in the lounge waiting installation. It had been their plan for the next day to begin that.
Did he plan on doing it by himself, now?
The thought of Owen finishing the renovations on the house that they had been meant to live in as a married couple and eventually a family, brought the tears to her eyes again and she rubbed them away with the backs of her hands impatiently. It was not the time for another melt down, she scolded herself, she didn’t know when he would be back, and she didn’t want to be caught skulking through his things. There was a desperation and lack of dignity to being found doing so. To doing so, in the first place, she admitted as she crept down the hall.
In the bedroom, he had set up a very makeshift bed from a camping mattress he must have borrowed from Daniel, and a sleeping bag. There was something very adolescent about the arrangement. At least if Megan were right, Emily thought wryly, and he was planning on hooking up, he would not be bringing his dates back to the house to f-k. No woman in her right mind would think it was a sexy set up, as bare as it was of even the most basic furniture.
His beaten-up suitcases and shoes, and a few boxes of items from the house, were stacked against the wall with little care, as if he had impatiently shoved what he considered unimportant there and moved on to other things. As was typical of his priorities, his guitar and amp were perfectly set up with attention to detail and had a notepad and paper next to them indicating that even in the short time since he had moved out, he had found time to play. She flicked through the notepad. Music and lyrics. There was nothing unusual to that.
Ever since they were teenagers, Owen had composed his own songs. Some of them they had performed together during high school, and during their university years when they had played at weddings, restaurants, or busked for extra cash. Owen had always loved performing, but it had never been something she had liked to do. She had always felt like a mouse pretending to be a peacock when she performed.
She loved to sing, had studied opera for many years, but her voice belonged to someone else, she had always thought. Someone bolder, someone flashier, someone more vivid than she was. She had given away her studies when there had been nowhere left to go other than pursue it as a career, because singing for a living wasn’t something she could imagine herself doing.
She had performed because Owen had wanted to, but he had known that she was not comfortable on the stage, and slowly, over the years, in concession to her reluctance, he had stopped asking and she had been relieved.
She almost set the notepad aside, but then hesitated. Sometimes Owen, in haste, would write things down on the back cover of last page of his notebooks, that were not music related. She turned the notepad to the back. On the last page, was something scrawled in messy, almost illegible handwriting. She flipped the notepad upside down, making the last page the first. “Two Way Street. Cordelia, 7pm, High Street.”
Cordelia. Cordelia was the name of the wedding singer they had hired. A pretty, young woman with a slightly husky voice that Owen had thought was great. She’d had a good repertoire, and an easy-going charm that made her very approachable. Emily had thought she seemed a little spacey and vague and had hoped she would not prove unreliable on the day, but Owen had been keen to give her a shot.
They had never met her on High Street at 7pm, it had always been daytime. Initially they had met at a coffee shop, and later had gone to see her perform at a winery, doubling an audition with a date night. Emily remembered how lovely it had been, sitting in the dapple shade of a grape vine, eating cheese and olives and drinking wine with Owen, listening to Cordelia sing, and imagining their wedding together.
Her heart tightened in pain.
She checked her phone. It was nearly eight. No, she told herself firmly. This was not a corny romantic comedy where the groom fell in love with the wedding singer, and realised he was not in love with his childhood sweetheart. That sort of thing did not happen in real life.
There was some other explanation.
Emily put the notepad back as she had found it, the beat of her heart painful against her ribs, seeming to pound in her throat, and her ears filled with a rush of white noise. On automatic pilot she made her way back through the house, erasing any sign that she had been there, and turning out the lights, until she stood on the front porch, locking the door, much as Owen had done over an hour before. She made her way back to her house - the tears dry now as dread began to set in. Was Megan right? The neighbour across the road was at his letter box. She was certain that he had checked his mail three times already, and Mrs Essen next door was watering very late, standing on her driveway with her hose pointed away from Emily’s house, her back to her, as if determinedly not watching. Snooping, she thought with embarrassed anger. They had obviously seen Owen’s move during the day. She and Owen had become the street’s entertainment, as good as any soap opera, she thought angrily as she let
“People in your sensible world, Em, don’t do that. I don’t care about my job. Designing carparks,” he snorted in disgust. “It is bullshit. This isn’t living, Em, it is… beige.” “Beige?” He laughed, and it was no longer a happy sound, the opposite in fact. “Yes, beige, Em. It is humdrum. It is just existing. It is doing the sensible and expected because it is responsible. It is smothering.” She stared at him, her face pale. “You have never said you feel this way.” “I didn’t want to…” he paused and raked his hand through his hair. “I didn’t want to hurt you Em. But I have to, or I’m hurting myself. My life, my job, my clothing… It’s all just bullshit. Not what I want, to do, to wear. This person,” he threw a hand towards the photos of them laughing on the wall, “is not the person I want to be.” “I love you, Em,” he said. “I love you, but I don’t think I am in love with you. I want to be. But there is no… fire to it. I want more.” He drew in a sharp breath, as if shocked by what he
“No, I do know it says non-refundable,” Emily closed a window to block out the music from next door. Owen’s band was using the house to practise in again. Cars had been rocking up all morning, and the street was lined with beaten up, paint-challenged vans and Utes. Surely there was not so many people in the band? What were the rest of them there for? “But it says, non-refundable unless you manage to rebook the venue on that day. “Now, I know for a fact you have waiting lists because I was on one. The date is still six months out. I am sure if you call one of the brides who were also on that waiting list, someone will want the venue on that date. Hell, if you give me the list of phone numbers, I will call them for you.” As she moved through cancelling the many bookings that they had made for the wedding, Emily was learning to be pushy. People who had been only too happy to be helpful and answer any question they had, who had been always cheerful and pleasant to deal with, showed anot
By the time the ugly, beaten-up cars that crowded the pretty little street began to pull away, and Owen knocked on her front door, she had ordered pizza, opened a bottle of wine, and had two lists lined up on the coffee table. “Wow,” he said, shrugging out of the leather jacket as he entered. “We could use your skills for the band.” “Shall we start at the top?” She was curt as she took her seat, pressing herself tightly against the arm of the couch, her knees tight and her ankle bones digging into each other, physically holding herself together as if doing so would hold her emotionally intact. “Sure,” he said warily, sitting on the couch next to her, sitting close not out of desire for proximity but because it was practical in order to go through the lists with her, she knew. “You seem… mad.” “Mad?” She repeated. “Why would I be mad? I have just spent twenty-two years of my life believing I loved someone and was loved back, only to find out that it was a lie, and now the future we
The doorbell rang and they both jumped, looking automatically towards the hall, guilty as teenagers caught making out on the couch by parents coming home unexpectedly. “Shit, the pizza,” he realised the source of the doorbell first, his laughter shifting as he lifted from her and closed his jeans. He paused a moment, looking down at her, his eyes smouldering. “You look f-king sexy like that Emily,” he commented, and she flushed, pleased despite the offhanded crudity of the comment. He went to answer the door, and she sat up, waiting until the door closed again and pulling her clothing as much to order as she could with her underwear and skirt in rags, feeling exposed and vulnerable, and sluttish. Owen, fully dressed and looking nothing like he had just f-ked her stupid on the couch, joked with the pizza delivery man, as he accepted the pizzas and bid him to have a good night, before using his elbow and hip to close the door. “I will be just a moment,” she told him from the couch.
Emily took the pizzas out to the garbage bin and threw them away, and then returned to the lounge room and drank the rest of the wine, before drunkenly falling asleep on the couch. In the morning, nursing a hangover to accompany her broken heart, she called the real estate agent, and put the other house on the market, as Megan had told her to do from the beginning. She was starting to think that she should have followed Megan’s advice. She eyed up her hair speculatively in the reflection of the laptop. Well, maybe not all her advice, she decided. “What the f–k are you doing, Em?” Owen demanded the following evening, catching her as she returned from work and made her way down the garden path, his blue eyes blazing with anger and his cheeks flushed with it as he strode across the lawn. “What do you mean, what am I doing?” She was taken aback by his aggressive approach, snapped out of thoughts of the latest book she was reviewing with surprise. She backed up a step, suddenly wary. Wh
Emily tried to focus on the screen, but the words seemed to slip in and out of her mind without their meaning registering. She had read the same paragraph four times, without being able to recall one word of it, or what the meaning behind the words was. She suspected she was going to need a strong black coffee to get through the afternoon. Maybe two. And it was barely past lunch. But her attention was so divided she might as well give in and go home as she was not going to achieve anything significant like this – except that Emily never gave in and skipped work. It wasn’t in her work ethic to do so. In truth, though she didn’t want to admit it to herself, she had gone home mentally weeks ago, but she kept to the routine of work because staying all day in an empty house echoing with the ghost of Owen was far worse than coming to her office and fighting her way through another meaningful day of drudgery. And every dollar she made now, would be useful for when she quit her job and moved
Emily sat in the car going through the tracks and the music, whilst Owen greeted the band members, and signed in at the door to the studio. They began to unload the van, making treks to and from with a flat-trayed trolley, collecting drums, guitars, amps, and keyboard. Every time she glanced up - they were making another trip. Owen signalled for her to join him during the last trip, and she removed the earpieces, and slung her laptop bag over her shoulder as she left the car, hearing it beep locked behind her as Owen activated the key. “This is Em,” he said to the men as they walked towards the double doors. There were only the four of them, including Owen, which made her wonder what all the extra people who had been coming and going from the house next door were there for. Owen draped his arm over her shoulders as she came to stand behind him, the action both habitual and proprietary. “Hi,” she said, uncertainly. She thought she recognized some of them from the times she had snoop