Our Magic Hour (22 page)

Audrey looked down at her hand. Her knuckles were grazed.

‘It's not bleeding,' she said. ‘How'd you know where I was?'

‘Pip told me to follow you. She had a feeling about that guy.'

Snow was falling, tiny flakes gathering under the floodlights.

Audrey stopped walking. Her arms were shaking.
Fight or flight
, Nick would have said.
She realised her shirt buttons were undone but for two. ‘I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Thanks,'
she said. She wrapped her jacket around herself, zipped it up, pulled the cuffs down
over her hands. ‘I thought he was okay.'

‘Didn't your mum teach you about stranger danger?'

‘Don't talk to me like I'm a child.'

‘Don't act like one.'

The blood was rushing in her arms. ‘Fuck you. I can hold my own.'

‘
Hold my own
. God, you're a loose unit.'

They stumped back to the house. It seemed a long way. Pip was waiting in the kitchen,
three mugs set out.

‘Everything okay?' she asked. She looked from face to face.

‘Fine,' Audrey said.

After Pip had gone to bed Julian and Audrey sat at the table.

‘Did you ever argue with your mum or dad and then go out to pick a fight?' Audrey
asked. Julian looked at his mug of tea. ‘I mean, you knew you were in the wrong,
but instead of apologising you tried to get your head kicked in. Then you could feel
like you'd copped the punishment without having to think about what it was for.'

Julian said nothing.

‘Forget it,' Audrey said. ‘I don't really know what guys do. Sorry.' She left the
mugs in the sink, left Julian at the kitchen table. They didn't talk about it again.

The fog hung low when they drove home on Sunday. Pip fell asleep. Julian tuned the
radio to an oldies station, volume down. Audrey dozed, too, in the back seat, but
somewhere near Goulburn she jerked awake when she heard it: Springsteen singing ‘Badlands'.
She said to Julian, ‘I was just listening to this yesterday.'

‘What, Bruce?'

‘Yeah, at the house, it was in the CD player.'

He turned it up and sang. Pip lifted her head and said, irritably, ‘Don't be a jerk,
Julian, I was asleep.' She settled back into her seat. ‘My mum loves the Boss. This
reminds me of being at home.'

Audrey looked at the poplars, the paddocks, the bleached-skull trees by the roadside.
‘There's this sign in Melbourne near the city,' she said. ‘Near the river. It's on
top of one of the factories. It's this rainbow that just says OUR MAGIC HOUR.'

‘“Our magic hour”. That's nice.' Pip yawned. ‘What made you think of that?'

‘I don't know,' Audrey said. Julian met her eyes in the rear-view mirror. She looked
away.

At home she left her bag and washing, and walked down to the beach. She phoned Adam
again. She was so relieved to hear his voice. He said
What's wrong, you sound weird
.
She told him about Jindabyne.

‘I don't know if he was going to do anything. I don't think he was a bad guy.'

‘You told him to stop and he didn't,' Adam said. ‘Are you okay? Do you want me to
come up?'

‘What? Don't be silly. I'm fine. You know, it just gives you a fright.'

A flock of gulls took off nearby. Their wings made a sound like paper rippling.

‘I keep waiting to be punished,' Audrey said, ‘but it never comes.'

‘You've done nothing wrong. Spence? Are you crying?'

‘No!'

‘You have to care about yourself enough to be safe. You're behaving like a very depressed
person. This risk-taking shit, it's textbook. You know that.'

‘You can't just pathologise people. It wasn't risk-taking. I didn't know it was going
to happen.'

Adam was silent. Scabs had formed on her knuckles, and they itched.

Gritty Underfoot

When children died at Westmead, it was at the hands of some terrible division of
abnormal cells, not a parent who knew no better or was too stoned to care. It was
Audrey's job to make the families comfortable, to offer taxi vouchers, food vouchers,
emergency housing, support. She no longer visited houses where syringes lolled on
stovetops and dog shit laced the floorboards. Still. It was a shock the first time
one of the kids died. It was the first time she'd really hated the commute: she only
wanted to be home, closed off from everyone, but it was the train to Central, then
the bus across the city. She sat in the window. The streets were green with growth,
the bougainvillea was out. At Randwick the horses were being walked around the track.
Everyone sang out
Thank you
when they got off the bus. Meningioma tumour, neglect:
they were just different kinds of defeat. Audrey wondered when she'd build up the
muscles for it again.

The front door was open. Audrey went to the kitchen to find a beer. Julian was in
the living room playing a car-racing video game. He said
Hey
without looking up.
A furrow of concentration snaked
across his forehead. Audrey was halfway to the stairs
before he said it—‘Hey, could you transfer the money for the internet?'

‘I did it the other day.'

‘Oh'—irritation in his voice—‘well, can you tell me next time?'

Audrey stood looking at him. At last he threw down the console in sudden frustration
and turned to her.

‘Yes,' she said. ‘I'll let you know.'

There was a string of missed calls on her phone. She sat on the floor to play the
messages. Three from Sylvie, one from David, one from Bernie: Irène had had the baby
at four o'clock that afternoon, a boy, seven pounds something, it was very quick,
everyone was fine. Bernie's message was like a performance piece for radio, an impression
of Sylvie. Audrey laughed until her eyes were streaming. She missed him.

She called her mother. Sylvie was still at the hospital.

‘I wish
ton papa
could see him,' Sylvie said. ‘You remember how happy he was when
Zoe was born?'

Sometimes Audrey wondered if they recalled the same man at all. There were a few
photos of Neil holding Zoe as a baby. He'd been sick by then. He'd ended up in a
palliative care facility on the peninsula, near the golf course, not far from the
home all the children had escaped. The roads were poorly lit. Audrey hated driving
there at night: tired, she'd hallucinate ragged figures or animals by the side of
the road, lurching out from behind trees.

There came a time when Audrey was no longer afraid of him. He'd suddenly become as
harmless as a plant. He changed quickly. His body bloated, the shape of his face
changed. He was an old man and in pain.

When he was close to the end, Audrey had submitted her final essay for her Masters
and drunk a glass of wine by herself somewhere on Elgin Street. She'd phoned Nick
from her sunny window seat. At home there'd been a surprise party: all her friends
crowded into
the front room of the Charles Street house, bunting on the wall spelling
out BRAIN PARTY, confetti and champagne in her hair, Nick kissing her in the kitchen.
She remembered Katy shrieking
You brilliant woman!
Audrey was unshowered, in a sloppy
shirt, sleepless from the night before. Yusra poached her an egg on toast and they
drank Veuve, then Yellowglen, and then beer. She remembered a spirited 4 a.m. clean-up,
Paddy singing
Many hands, make 'em light
. Giggling at the clatter of the bottles
in the recycling bin outside. Katy wiping down the benchtop. Dustpan and shovel for
broken glass. Audrey and Nick stood on the front step to wave the last of them off.

Sylvie had phoned the next morning.
Your papa is gone.
Audrey sat on the couch looking
at the wall opposite where the bunting had come unstuck overnight. Relief and sorrow
were already grinding against each other. Nick asked if it felt like the end of an
era. He was trying to understand. Audrey hadn't known how to explain that it was
just a fresh mystery. She might never have simple feelings about her father. A week
after his funeral she'd already begun to forget his face, and she wondered if maybe
he hadn't meant as much as she'd thought.

After she'd spoken to Zoe and Irène, Audrey sat on the floor for a long time, on
the bright rug Katy had brought her back from Mexico. The coarse fabric still smelled
of somewhere she'd never been, even after all the years she'd had it. She saw herself
in the mirror by the clothes rack she'd assembled the day she'd moved in. Shirt unbuttoned
to the chest, handbag puddled beside her on the floor. Untidy hair, crooked nose.
Bare face, a look of mild astonishment, as though she couldn't quite believe she
was seeing herself there.

Claire suggested the bookshop to her. It was on Oxford Street. It must have been
a home or boarding house in another lifetime, an
old terrace whose rooms divided
the genres, with a café at the bottom. It was out of the way, but Audrey had time
to waste. Her weekends were empty. She was still working out the city. She still
paused to examine bus routes.

She stood upstairs in front of the shelves. She was holding the book close to her
nose. A man—a boy, he was younger than her—made to squeeze past. He had a teapot
and honey in his hands. Audrey realised he was an employee. She was embarrassed about
how distracted she'd been, standing in the passageway. She stepped back. The boy
said
Sorry, darling
as he passed. Audrey felt old for the first time in her life.
She paid for the book downstairs, reeled out of the shop into the thick afternoon.
She guessed her way to the Botanic Gardens and lay on the grass to read, but it began
to rain in sudden, fat drops. Her feet slid in her sandals. She stood in a greenhouse
and waited for the weather to ease. She paced up and down the brickwork between the
staghorn ferns and the cyclamen. Her parka was wet and cold. She thought about the
fastest way to get home. She was stunned with loneliness.

She looked after Elliott the next morning while Claire worked. At the door, Claire
squeezed her fingers and said
Thanks for doing this at the last minute
.

Audrey and Elliott sat on the carpet and cut pictures out of magazines for collages.
She was amazed at how long the task held his attention. They took racquets and a
shuttlecock to the big park, but it was windy and hard to play, and Elliott was irritable.
Audrey took his sticky hand and they walked home across Chalmers Street. He rolled
the shuttlecock between his fingers.

‘It looks like a lady in a long dress,' he said, ‘or a vampire.'

‘We could dress up when we get home if you want.'

‘It's okay,' he said. He balanced the plastic feathered thing on his palm. ‘Do you
like living with Julian?' he asked.

‘He takes my food and won't let me change the TV channel, but he's all right. I don't
see him all the time.' Audrey thought about it. ‘What made you ask that?'

Elliott shrugged. ‘I want to live with him again. Me and Claire did before, but I
was a baby, this big'—he spread his hands to demonstrate—‘and I don't remember.'
He shook his head so his hair fell across his little face. ‘Do I look like him?'

‘I suppose, a bit.'

‘Claire says I've got his mouth, but the rest of me looks like her.'

Audrey studied his features. She could only see Claire's angles, her pale hair, intelligent
brow.

‘I
wish
we could all live together again!' Elliott said. His face lightened, darkened
with the shadows of trees and houses.

‘Sometimes you can really like someone, but you just can't live with them. Claire
and Julian are probably like that. It's good they still get along.'

‘Yeah.' He was unconvinced.

Claire was later than she'd said. Audrey didn't mind. It was good to be needed, even
in small ways. But she was tired when she got home. The wind had turned light and
warm. Music streamed from one of the nearby flats. The cicadas were just starting
up. She met Julian at the gate: she was coming, he was going.

‘Pip's copulating very loudly in there,' he said. ‘I'm going to have a beer. Wanna
come?'

They power-pedalled up the rolling streets, Audrey following Julian, to Randwick.
They stopped by the cinema, crossed the road to a narrow bar with BAT COUNTRY in
thin capital letters over the entrance. They sat in a booth. The light was fashionably
dusky, the menu full of complicated drinks and craft beers.

‘I looked after El today,' Audrey said.

‘Yeah, Claire's got that funeral on tomorrow, hasn't she.' Julian
was sorting his
coins into piles. ‘She'll be busy.'

‘He was talking about you. About when you still lived with him and Claire.'

‘He romanticises it. He was three when Claire and I split up. He couldn't possibly
remember,' he said, but tenderly. ‘There were five or six of us all living where
we are now. I'm the only one still left. We used to have a lot of parties. Cheap
meat and crap wine. Sometimes we'd have slab days.'

‘I don't know what that is.'

‘Everyone brings a slab and then you have to plough through it all. Anyway, Clairy
and I ended up together for a few years, and then we had Elliott. We were ridiculously
young. Claire was twenty, I think. When we split up, we thought we could go on living
together, but
being
separate, you know? We were such hippies!' Audrey said nothing.
‘Eventually El started to piss people off. He was pretty precocious, and nobody was
used to having kids around. So he and Claire moved out.'

Julian pushed over his coin piles, and began restacking them in size order.

Audrey watched his hands. ‘You don't talk about him.'