What Love Sounds Like (22 page)

“You pack your bags and I’ll pick you up early tomorrow morning. I’ll fly us both down to the bay.”

“Saul, why are you assuming I have the whole weekend off work?”

“Because I checked with your supervisor.”

Her eyes widened at his gall. “You didn’t.”

“You bet I did. Gran’s donating a whole wing to that hospital, in Pop’s memory. The least they can do is tell me your schedule.”

She bounced up from the sofa. Her hands went to her hips. The old yoga pants she wore had slid down. She angrily hitched them up. “You arrogant, manipulative … You didn’t just ask for my schedule, did you? You made sure I had the whole weekend off.”

Infuriatingly, he relaxed into a grin, holding his palms up in a gesture of innocent, misunderstood goodwill.

“Ooh.” She picked up a cushion and threw it at him. She’d spent years proving that she was herself, and not Stuart Wharton’s stepdaughter. She’d worked for everything she had. But with Saul throwing his weight around the hospital, they would all look at her differently.

“It’s not so bad, Grace.” He put the cushion aside and stood. “The family wants you at the bay, and you look like you need a holiday. Come and celebrate Australia Day with us. I’ll pick you up at six o’clock tomorrow morning.”

She fumed silently.

“And the two of us will show everyone we’re the best of friends,” he continued remorselessly. “Pack your bathing suit.”

“I won’t go surfing with you.”

“Then you can sit on the beach and admire my style.” A finger tapped her nose.

She nearly went cross-eyed watching it approach and retreat.

He grinned and let himself out of the house.

Emma was only in Connor’s life for as long as he was asleep. The moment he opened his eyes, figured out where he was and remembered who was to blame, he’d cast her out.

Again.

Her guilt shadowed her from room to room, slept beside her in bed. She’d taken up a daily vigil of suffering in the hospital alongside him. For as long as he was here, she would be.

As he slept in the recovery ward, she waited in the cafeteria. Cutlery scraped against ceramic, chairs groaned over the tiled floor and people spoke quietly, ever mindful of where they were and what that meant. Sickness lingered in the air, mixed in with the scents of food, cleaning products and people. Everything about Zouki Café offered an attractive distraction, from the roof tiles that looked like puzzle pieces to the letters carved in the backs of the chairs, but it couldn’t make people forget…especially when a man shuffled to a table wearing a white gown, dragging after him an IV stand on a mobile pedestal.

Emma turned from one of the many televisions to watch him. He held a mobile phone with both hands, clearly waiting to receive a call. He shifted every so often, checked the screen. Sighed quietly. She wished she knew his number.

It was raining outside and everyone within the walls of the Royal Melbourne Hospital appeared to know it, even if they hadn’t seen the sky in days. It was a long, wet Sunday and some people had tried everything on the varied Zouki menu by now. People like Emma.

Today she’d packed lunch. She couldn’t face another slice of cake or stuffed croissant and all the hot food was starting to look and taste the same. She’d been coming here too long. Long enough, in fact, to know which seats caught the sweet aromas of the flower shop down the hallway. Roses, gerberas, Australian natives. She’d bought a bunch yesterday and taken them home. Connor wouldn’t have wanted them. Or even known they were there.

Just as he wouldn’t know about the horrid purple bear sitting on one of the visitor seats, or the naff ‘Gone but not Frog-otten’ card that his colleagues had signed. If he could open his eyes he would cringe. They were an eyesore and an insult to taste.

“Are you still thinking about that bear?” her best friend Affni asked.

Emma spooned a scoop of yoghurt into her mouth. It tasted sour. “That purple hurts my eyes.”

“It could have been worse. She could have bought the blue.”

Emma conceded this point with a nod. The blue was infinitely uglier.

Four nurses seated themselves at the table beside them. Each looked weary, and Emma wondered how many hours they had been tending the sick. One of the women began to speak in fractured English, gesturing wildly with her hands. Spanish slid in and out of her sentences as the others listened on, eating their meals and cradling their coffees. The man in the gown struggled to his feet and left. His phone hadn’t rung.

“This place is sucking the life out of me,” Emma grumbled. “Everyone’s waiting for something. Waiting to leave, waiting to die.”

Affni’s fingertips brushed against her wrist—mocha against vanilla. “You’ve been here every day for a fortnight. Maybe you should take a day off. Recharge.”

Emma shook her head. “I shouldn’t complain.”

“You’ve every right to. He won’t know, Emma.”

“I’ll know.”

Affni squeezed the back of Emma’s hand then began cutting up her schnitzel. She hid her eyes behind her liquorice-coloured fringe, but Emma didn’t need to see them to know there was judgement there. Affni didn’t approve of Emma’s guilt.

They ate quietly for a time, then Affni said, “I saw Asha in the gift shop again.”

“Maybe she bought him a pillow with his name on it today.”

“Maybe.”

Emma pushed her yoghurt aside and snapped open her container of carrot sticks. They didn’t taste good either.

A grey-haired woman in a white patterned dressing gown walked past, a loaded plate of stir-fry in her hands and two chattering friends in tow. The three sat down and began discussing grandchildren, a neighbour called Maggie and Donna’s crook hip. Combined they had the appetite of ten men.

“What will you do when he wakes up?” Affni asked. She kept her head down, her focus on her lunch.

Emma stopped chewing and considered. That question had haunted her since the accident, and her answer had changed every day. “I don’t know. Maybe I should just buy one of those God-awful cards from the gift shop and apologise in that. Should I even be here?”

Affni looked up. “I don’t know, Em.” She poked at her potato, as if unsure whether to continue. “Not because it’s your fault, but because of who you are.”

“Explain it to me again,” Dana insisted.

Emma struggled to control any sign of her impatience. She didn’t have time to repeat herself; a truckload of steel would be turning into Southbank Boulevard any minute, and she still needed to brief the Auditorium’s General Foreman. But pushing against the client wouldn’t get her out of this meeting room faster, so she took a steadying breath and started again.

Dana Vickers watched her through narrow pink-rimmed glasses. Her hair tumbled about her face in a kind of controlled chaos, and the enormous peacock broach on her collar winked and glittered in the light. It had been distracting Emma for over an hour. Dana took notes as Emma spoke, her handwriting utterly illegible to Emma’s eye, and made soft sounds in her throat whenever she agreed or understood something. Ten minutes later Emma had heard that sound only twice.

People around them were beginning to fidget, and some were bold enough to check their watches. Dana was unmoved.

“If the subcontractor proceeded on the assumption that the technical drawings were unchanged, then they are clearly at fault. The cost should not be absorbed by the project.”

Emma nodded, not in agreement, but to show that she had listened. “Be that as it may, it is a dangerous step to punish NJK for attempting to keep up with the fast-track program. It sends a bad message. The subcontractors are taking risks for us to keep things moving. If we slam a twenty k bill on their heads for their trouble we could lose a lot more in the long term. Dana, I don’t mean to be rude, but I need to wrap this up. I’m happy to discuss this offline with you but right now I have somewhere I need to be.”

Dana angled her chin. The woman might have been twenty years her senior, but she didn’t have the authority to question Emma’s priorities. She nodded, and fifteen chairs slid back from the table.

Another weekly consultant meeting out of the way, at last. Emma hurried to her desk, hoping to intercept Mark before he headed over to site. She dropped her notepad and pen next to her keyboard, scanned her unread email subjects for anything that couldn’t wait, then seized her phone and dialled Mark’s number. It rang in her ear and on the desk nearby. She cursed and ended the call.

Connor had never left his phone behind—it had been practically grafted to him—but his replacement had a tendency to forget things, like his phone, safety glasses or reporting structure. Whatever her feelings towards Connor, he was good at what he did. Mark was not. So the sooner Connor dragged himself out of bed and back to work the better life would be for everyone.

Emma hadn’t had a chance to slip out of her high-visibility vest since first putting it on at seven o’clock this morning. She added a hardhat to her ensemble and hooked her safety glasses around the back of her neck.

A single beep made her turn. Mark stepped through the security door, returning from the toilets, and spotted her. His expression was neutral as he approached. At twenty-eight, Emma was ten years younger than Mark, and she suspected that he was loath to report to her, but that had not yet come up between them. She supposed that her being a woman was a source of consternation for him as well, but he wisely kept this to himself, save for the odd disparaging look or long-suffering sigh.

“How did the toolbox meeting go this morning?” she asked him. She clipped a radio to the loop in her jeans and pocketed her phone. “Were the subbies briefed on what to expect this afternoon?”

He nodded. “Damo gave them the spiel then Artie laid down the law. I think he was expecting you to be there.”

“I can’t split myself in half, Mark. What questions were raised?”

“None.”

Damn. There would have been questions had she been there. The subbies felt comfortable enough with her to speak their minds, but something about Mark made people hold their tongues. Maybe it was his attitude and the fact that he strode from place to place with an air of urgency, always on his way to somewhere else. Tell him quick. Don’t hold him up. It was utter rubbish, because the man had nowhere else to be except where he was. As General Foreman of the Auditorium, he stalked the Stalls, Circle and Balcony levels, and most recently the platform atop the birdcage scaffold. If he wasn’t in one of these locations. he was supposed to be at his desk in the project office.

She missed Connor.

The thought startled her. Feeling a little off balance, she struggled to find the right answer. Had Mark asked her a question? Damien Long, or ‘Damo’, was the project’s Safety and Environment Manager. Ever diligent, she imagined his briefing would have been a dot-point account of what could go wrong and what had been done to avoid it. He wasn’t the most optimistic of people, but Emma supposed she’d be hardened too if she’d seen the things he had. Arthur Strange was the Site Manager, and his efficient enthusiasm would have been a nice balm over Damo’s sombreness. She wondered what role Mark had played. Had he said anything to bolster the team? Had he had questions of his own? He’d only been on the job a fortnight, after all, not long enough to have found his feet.

Undoubtedly pride would have kept him mute.

“I want to have another look at the scaffolding before the steel gets here,” Emma said, “and I want your opinion on a few things. Let’s head over.”

She didn’t miss the way he bristled before he strode off to get his things.

Connor, too, had at first grumbled about reporting to her, but they had worked together for so long that there hadn’t been any heat in his complaints. They’d started together on this project almost a year ago, and they had been a stellar team. She missed the half-language they had adopted, the way they had come to anticipate one another. He’d made work easier for her, even fun. She’d lost count of the times she’d heard his booming laugh and found herself smiling too.

Someone moved to stand at her elbow and she turned. It was Lara, the ever smiling office manager. The pair had become immediate friends, linked by their love of sugar, bad television sitcoms and dirty jokes. Lara held out a small white bowl stuffed full of jelly snakes.

Emma grinned and reached for a yellow one. “Thanks.”

“You look like you’re having a crap day.”

Emma nodded. “I’ve been justifying myself all morning.”

Lara’s voice dropped. “Is he giving you a hard time again?”

The woman saw everything
, Emma thought. She looked over at Mark standing by his desk and gearing up, and said, “He’s trying.”

“Good luck.” She began to back away, conscious of Emma’s need to move on. “Give me a call when the crane’s about to drive through? I want to get some pictures to mark the moment.”

“Will do, but that won’t be until Wednesday.” She smiled and raised the snake. “I needed this.” She bit its head off as she left the office, Mark on her heels. As they crossed the pedestrian bridge and circled the Theatres Building, she thought to make conversation, but found she couldn’t be bothered. The man was a trial at the best of times, but her silver lining was that he would be gone soon enough that she needn’t trouble herself to make him feel comfortable.

Their steel-capped boots thudded against the paving. Thunderclouds bruised the sky, but the weather bureau hadn’t predicted rain until tonight. She hoped they were right. There was much to do today.

They reached St Kilda Road, and the large grey drum slid into sight. Hamer Hall—Melbourne’s premiere concert venue—her place of work for the next twelve months and her favourite project to date. She’d been involved in a number of new builds and one other redevelopment prior to this one, but Hamer Hall had found a special place in her heart. The building alliance that was running the redevelopment project gave her a headache sometimes—working conditions unlike anything she had experienced before—but she was so damn proud of the work they had done so far that she came to work every day thirsty for more progress.