Our Magic Hour (12 page)

‘No.'

An older woman was walking towards them.

‘Is she all right?' she asked.

‘She's fine, we just had a bit of an accident with the footy.' Audrey was still trying
to stem the blood.

‘I saw,' said the woman. ‘Do you need a cold pack? We've got one in our freezer bag.'

Zoe stopped crying. The three of them traipsed across the road and stopped in front
of a gelato shop. Zoe took a long time to choose, peering seriously at the bright
containers.

They climbed into the car again just as the rain started. They drove back across
the bridge to the other side of the city. Zoe slept in the back seat. Nick and Audrey
laughed the whole way home, imitating their own panic: Nick's childless exclamation—
Fuck!
—and
Audrey's own clumsy face-cleaning skills. ‘So much snot!' The clipped woman proffering
her cold pack and child-rearing expertise.

‘Is that what happens if you're a parent? Do you turn into that? Fucking—
cold packs.
'

‘The amoxicillin's in a bottle in a Ziploc bag in her backpack.'

At home, Nick and Zoe played cards on the living room floor while Audrey made dinner.

‘Let's get that T-shirt off you, Zo. I'll give it a wash in the sink before your
mum arrives,' she suggested.

‘Yeah, that's a good idea. I reckon it looks worse than it actually was,' Nick said.
‘Snap!'

Adam dropped by before dinner and took the fourth chair at the table. He and Zoe
looked curiously at each other. He spoke without tempering his language or topics.
It all streamed on: his assignments, an article he'd read on sex trafficking, his
parents, his latest session with his psychologist. He was calling her
Liv
now. When
Audrey looked around the table, Zoe was listening with the rapt attention of a child
suddenly counted among adults. Nick had tired eyes, sunken stones in wet sand. Once
he started a thumb war with Zoe. Once he got up to change the record.

Irène and David didn't stay long. Audrey collected the clean T-shirt where it lay
drying on the heating vent, the medicine bottle from the bench. She stood on the
nature strip to wave goodbye. Her sister wound down the window and said
Thanks
again.

Audrey sat back down at the table.

‘You didn't tell me Irène was pregnant,' Adam said.

‘I'm sure I did.'

‘No, you didn't. You don't tell me anything any more,' he said. He was cheerful,
rolling a cigarette. He was poking fun at his own chattiness, the way he dominated
conversation, but Audrey felt Nick's leg press against hers.

It was late by the time Adam left. The record was still playing, but the house had
gone quiet. Audrey filled the sink with water and left the dishes there. Nick took
the empty bottles out to the bin. Audrey heard the muffled tink of glass.

He came back in and stood with a hand in his hair.

‘He's
so much
,' he kept saying. ‘He's just
so much
.'

Something about his expression, like a man shell-shocked, tugged at Audrey's chest.

‘Thanks for today,' she said. ‘With Zoe.'

‘It's family,' he shrugged. ‘Anyway. She's easy.'

He fell asleep quickly. Audrey tensed her muscles and relaxed them one at a time,
toes to jaw. She turned on the bedside light and
read sixty pages
.
She plucked her
eyebrows, humming to herself in the bathroom. She got back into bed and turned off
the light. Nick woke and laid an arm across her.

‘Enough.' He squinted at her. ‘Stop fidgeting.'

‘I can't sleep.'

‘Put all your body parts to sleep, one by one.'

‘I did.'

‘Guess it didn't work.'

‘Guess it didn't,' she echoed. He touched her face, but his eyes were already flickering
closed.

Audrey imagined disappearing through the mattress fibres. She could feel something
leaking out of her pores, ready to poison everyone else. She thought of how neat
and private Katy's sadness had been. It had built up like the salt crystals they'd
grown in school, climbing, climbing. She missed Katy. She was sorry beyond all endurance,
against all reason.

She wanted to wake up Nick, but she had nothing to tell him.

At lunch Sylvie spoke for sixteen minutes without pause about her job at the bank.
The waitress stood dumbly by the table, pad in hand, waiting for her to draw breath.
Audrey could have got up and left, and her mother wouldn't have noticed. She had
that cloudy look in her eyes.

For six minutes, Sylvie re-enacted a particularly spiteful conversation she and
Bernard had shared the previous week.

For four minutes, she listed the side effects of the new medication that Dr Lawrence
had prescribed her.

For nine minutes, she recounted a television program she'd seen on the ABC: ‘—you
know, the man, he's married to Jennifer Byrne—'

‘Andrew Denton.'

‘
Non
,
non
, not him. This man's smaller. He wears glasses. He used
to have a show
doing interviews. He was always having interesting people.'

‘Maman. It's Andrew Denton.'

‘No, I know who is Andrew Denton, and it's not him…'

The food arrived and went cold. Sylvie's words tripped over one another in their
hurry to get out. Audrey could not keep up. She saw her mother in static: head thrown
back in exuberance; hands splayed in the middle of a frenetic sentence; fork waving
in the air to punctuate a sentence. Audrey ordered another glass of wine. It was
all theatre and pity. Sylvie was lonely. She didn't see her children enough. She
was so happy to be having lunch with her daughter. Audrey knew these things, but
it made no difference. She felt drained and guilty.

Sylvie picked up her wineglass as though preparing a toast. ‘Happy birthday,
p'tit
lapin.
Always a good girl. Even when you were a baby.' The wine splashed in the glass.
‘Bernard was the trouble. Like he
knew
that he was an accident.'

‘Maman. Don't say that.'

‘I don't mean I don't want him, or something like that. I just remember him so much…wanting
things. Always crying, crying, crying.' She jabbed a finger across the table. ‘Don't
shake your head like that. You don't know what it's like to have that, all the time,
Maman
,
Maman
, and knowing that you have to fix it, to make him stop. You and Irène
were much easier. I remember, Audrey, I could leave you in your crib, and when I
came back you'd still be there on your back. Even if you were awake, you didn't cry.
Not like Bernard.'

‘Babies are supposed to cry when you leave them,' Audrey said. ‘They're meant to
cry. It means they expect you to come back.'

‘So I'm a bad mother because you don't cry when you were a baby.'

‘No, I don't—I don't know. I'm not saying that. I'm sorry.'

At last Sylvie shook out her napkin and spread it over her lap. She
looked at Audrey.

‘Ça va?'
she asked.

‘I'm fine.'

Sylvie speared a mushroom and regarded it without interest.
‘Je t'crois pas,'
she
said. ‘You look like you have some sort of… deficiency.'

‘Let's just have our lunch.'

‘I was only saying what I thought. Don't be so defensive.'

‘Well, why would you say that? A
deficiency
. How do you think that's going to make
someone feel?'

Sylvie was looking at the street outside, playing with her pack of cigarettes.

Audrey drove home along the freeway. The sky was pale and wide and she was thinking
about university, a cold afternoon lying on the whiskery grass with Adam. Him, philosophy:
pulling apart
Leviathan
, reading bits aloud to impress her, fistfuls of highlighters
colour-coding his knowledge. Her, social work: John Bowlby and attachment theory.
The Strange Situation. Identify child as being anxious-avoidant. Anxious-resistant.
Securely attached. Disorganised. Learn the signs and signals. A flat affect, a lack
of discrimination between mother and strangers. Seven black birds flying in formation,
a message in a crossword puzzle, a shape in the stars.

Audrey's throat ached.

Her birthday fell on a Thursday. The women made a fuss. Vanessa brought her a coffee
in the morning. Penny made an orange cake. The new inquest was announced in the afternoon.
It was all anybody talked about. Audrey had supervision. Vanessa said
We'll both
be subpoenaed, probably
. She said
Your case notes are exceptional
. She said
There's
absolutely nothing more you could have done
. Audrey nodded.

She left work half an hour early, hurried up Rathdowne Street to the clinic. It was
the fragile end of the day. She sat in one of the
chairs in the corridor of the old
terrace with her coat over her knees.

The doctor took Audrey's blood pressure first, asked her to step onto the scales,
made her lie down on the narrow table. Her hands were cool and broad. She put them
on Audrey's skin, pressed lightly. Audrey stared at the ceiling. It was a relief
to lie still. All the while the doctor spoke in a low murmur.

‘You're a student? Working?'

‘I work full time. I'm a protective worker.'

The doctor's hands went all over, as though trying to intuit something through the
skin. Audrey had forgotten the shame of medicine, it had been so long.

The doctor tapped at her computer keyboard as Audrey pulled on her boots. They finished
and looked up at each other at the same moment.

‘You can also try warm milk or herbal tea before bed. Go to sleep later. Make sure
you're eating enough.' Audrey sat with her legs dangling over the edge of the table.
The doctor smiled indulgently. ‘All the things you know how to do.'

Nick was waiting for her in the kitchen, sitting at the table with a beer.

‘Paddy was over,' he said. ‘You just missed him. How'd you get on?'

‘Okay. She gave me a script.' Audrey sat down and put the folded papers on the table
between them. Nick looked at her for a moment, and reached for the prescription.

‘Temazepam,' he said. ‘Woo-woo.'

Audrey reached for his beer. ‘How's Pat?' she asked.

‘What'd you get a pathology referral for?'

‘You can throw it out,' Audrey said. Nick went on looking at her, steady, but he
did as she said.

They made love in bed first, while the sky turned grim through
the window; then in
the shower, everything edged with heat. Audrey fell into a sleep too light for dreaming.
When Nick woke her she thought it was the middle of the night.

‘Come on. I said we'd get there at eight.'

‘Let's stay here. Nobody'd notice,' Audrey said.

‘Reckon they might. You're the birthday girl.'

Audrey wanted to stay in bed, sleep for weeks.

Nick sat on the end of the bed and watched her dress. She met his eyes in the mirror.
She couldn't remember why she'd let him and Adam organise anything. She didn't want
to celebrate her first birthday without Katy, didn't want to go to those same pubs
and see the same people. The Evelyn, the Backwash, the view from Ruckers Hill, the
Curtin: they'd been poisoned for her.
None of us can go back
, Katy's father had said.
Audrey bunched her stockings together at the feet so she wouldn't ladder them.

‘Tell me about Sylvie,' Nick said.

‘What, lunch yesterday? She was all right. Bit manic.'

‘No, I mean when you were small.'

Audrey found some lipstick and applied it leaning into the mirror, the way her mother
did. She faced him again.

‘Once when we were living in the Menzies Avenue flats, she decided to cook rabbit,
and I couldn't bring myself to eat it. I would have been about nine, Irène was probably
thirteen. Bern was still little. I ate all my vegetables and only the rabbit was
left. I took a bite and gagged on it, and Maman thought I was acting. She got really
cross and smacked me, and made me leave the table.' Audrey went to the wardrobe and
pulled out her coat. ‘So later,
Hey Hey It's Saturday
was on, and there was some
band playing. Irène and I were dancing, and I accidentally knocked over this beautiful
vase that Maman's parents gave her. It broke into five big bits, and Maman thought
I'd done it on purpose. She didn't yell. I felt terrible. I kept offering to glue
it, then I just went to my room and sat there. Much
later she came in and said she
was going to bed, but she handed me a little card with a picture of some mountains
on it. Inside was this Kate Greenaway poem about a mother telling off her naughty
kid—something about not being able to kiss a teary face. Neither of us really apologised,
but I knew she wasn't mad, and she knew I hadn't done it on purpose.'

Audrey picked up her scarf and stood waiting.

‘That's a nice story,' Nick said.

‘When she was a good mum, there was no one better. Irène and Bernie and I got a story
almost every night. We learned to read really quickly.' She remembered something
she hadn't thought of in years. ‘When she undressed us for a bath, she used to pull
our shirts over our heads and say
skin a bunny
. She must have learned it from Dad.'
She said it the way Sylvie had, slipped in and out of the accent the way she always
did when she mimicked her mother.

Nick ran his thumb along her hairline. ‘I like trying to picture you as a child,'
he said.

The pub was warm. A handful of her friends from work were standing by the open fire.
They turned to her. Audrey tried to remember what to do.