Our Magic Hour (35 page)

‘Listen, I've got a surprise for you.'

‘Don't tire him out, darling.' Paula.

‘It's okay, Mum. It's a visitor.' Nick stuck his head out the door, and ushered Audrey
into the room. Nick's mother stood to embrace her. The room smelled of chemicals
and Paula's perfume.

‘How are you doing?' Audrey said, turning to Doug. His hair was white and downy.
He was an old man in a chair with a hospital blanket over his legs.

‘After today, it's all over, red rover. It'll be good to finish,' he said.
He motioned
for her to sit. ‘You back for good?'

‘Yeah,' Audrey said, ‘I've come home.'

They all looked at one another. Nobody said anything.

‘Well, thanks for coming in, love,' Doug said. ‘You've been the brightest face I've
seen in a while.' It was raining harder now. A nurse came in. She turned on the brash
fluorescent light. She checked Doug's intravenous line, asked how he was feeling.
There were pearly beads of sweat on his upper lip. His mouth was waxy. Audrey could
see his feet trembling beneath the thin comforter.
I'm okay
, said Doug.
I'm doing
okay. This is Audrey
, he said. The nurse stayed to talk a while. When she left, the
Lukovics all said how lovely the staff were.

There was a program on travel in Victoria on the television.

‘That's what I'm going to do once this is all done,' Doug said, ‘I'm going to buy
a caravan. We'll go round Australia. What do you think, Paula?'

Paula was hemming a skirt. She looked up over her glasses, pins between lips, and
smiled.

‘If it's a nice caravan, with its own shower and toilet. And if you help to clean
it.'

‘You don't
clean
a bloody
caravan
, you whacker.'

‘You do if you bloody
live
in it.'

Audrey looked at Nick, who looked away with a twisted face.

He got up and left after a while, and Audrey sat with his parents. They asked about
Sydney, about her job and her friends. It was kind-hearted interest. It made her
sad. She asked after Will. He'd finished his degree. He'd been travelling. They'd
told him not to come home when Doug started treatment, but of course he did.

After half an hour, Doug closed his eyes and asked Paula to pass him the green plastic
kidney dish. Audrey left them alone.

She found Nick on the steps out the front of the hospital, head bowed. She sat beside
him.

‘I'm sorry,' he said to his knees. ‘He's going to be okay. He looks really good.
The specialist said he's doing better than they could have imagined.' Audrey cradled
him. He put a hand over his face. She felt him shaking. ‘He's going to be okay. I
don't know why I'm crying.'

He shook and she held him. They sat there until he was done.

They started walking in the wrong direction, through the Fitzroy Gardens. It had
stopped raining. They moved slowly and without touching.

‘Thanks for coming today,' Nick said. ‘It means a lot.'

‘I wish I'd known sooner.' She wrapped her coat tighter around herself. Her neck
was cold, bare where her hair had been cut. ‘We don't have to keep hanging out. I
just wanted to see you.'

‘I know. I missed you, too.'

‘We could be better,' Audrey said. He smiled, but not at her. ‘What?' she asked.
‘What's that face for?'

‘That's the Audrey Spencer defensive pose. Head bent forwards, arms crossed. Making
yourself as small as you can.' Nick stopped walking to mimic her.

‘The other night, when you said you didn't know if you could do it again.'

‘That was a shitty thing to say.'

‘It's okay,' she said. ‘I get it. I'm glad you said it.'

‘No. The way it came out made it sound like the onus should be on you all the time,
and that's not fair.'

‘What do you want to do?'

‘I think,' Nick said, ‘when it ended up so bad, it's hard to imagine things being
good again.'

They blinked at the wind. Audrey folded her arms across her chest before she could
stop herself, and Nick laughed aloud. ‘What do
you
want, Audrey?'

‘It could happen again,' she said.

‘I know.'

She looked away. He bent his head and kissed her where her hair was parted. They
were cocooned there for a second. ‘Come on,' he said. ‘It's going to rain again.'

In the kitchen at Charles Street she tried to put together the ingredients for a
soup. Nick trailed after her.

‘Hey Spence.'

‘What.'

‘Stop moving away from me.'

Lead-ring eyes, slow smile. It was almost normal.

They sat in front of the television. Nick fell asleep halfway through the show. When
Audrey got up to switch it off, tell him to go to bed, he opened his eyes.

‘I thought I might have some friends over for my birthday next week,' he said, ‘our
friends. Do a potluck dinner here. Would that be weird?'

‘I don't know. Only as weird as you make it.'

‘Tell me the rules,' he said, feigning panic, grabbing at her arms.

All she could think was
Give it back, give it back, give it back
.

They drove out to Tyabb together. Audrey watched the road. When she picked at her
cuticles, he reached for her hand.

They pulled into the drive and sat for a moment, looking at the old house. The weatherboards
were flaking, the hinges rusting in the salt air. The verandah had rotted away in
places.

‘It looks old, doesn't it.'

Nick said nothing.

Sylvie produced tea and biscuits. She sat twisting her hands, asking questions, telling
stories. Her cigarettes waited in their pack on the coffee table. When Nick offered
to go out and chop some wood for her, she accepted graciously.
C'est un vrai gentilhomme
,
she muttered.

The wind roared in the rafters.

‘How's the new job going?' Audrey asked.

Now Sylvie reached for a cigarette. ‘I want it to be temporary,' she said. ‘The pay
is very bad. Fifteen dollars an hour.'

‘That's absurd. Do you need money?'

‘No,' Sylvie said. ‘It's okay. I have enough.'

‘Fifteen bucks—that's what I used to get working at the servo when I was at uni.
You're worth more than that.'

An odd expression came over Sylvie's face. She sat forwards with her legs spread,
set her elbows on her knees. She narrowed her eyes.

‘Work has no intrinsic value,' she said, stabbing at the air with her cigarette.
‘Only the value you fight to give it.'

She was imitating Neil. The two women were still giggling when Nick came back. He
looked from one face to the other, gave a small, confused smile. He didn't ask.

Bitter, starry night, everyone in the backyard at Charles Street. Audrey was wearing
a thermal shirt, striped in lairy colours, beneath her coat. Adam had already taken
pictures of her in it, posing mock-sexy in her thick socks and tights in the kitchen.

She'd gone inside to get another bottle of wine, and now she stood by the back door
watching her friends. They were crowded around the fire pit in their chairs. Their
skin and eyes shone in the dark; their teeth gleamed when they laughed. Yusra and
Mark playing mercy, Yusra's arm trembling with the effort; Bernie with a blanket
wrapped around him like a mystic. Ben and Patrick poking at the flames, feigning
indignation when Giulia said
What is it with blokes and being the boss of the fire?
Emy holding out her empty glass to Johnny, tilting her face, smiling like a queen.
The light fell clammy and dramatic from the floodlamp.
Some kid comes past the tent
and goes ‘Have you guys got any nangs?', and Johnny yells ‘Don't put that shit in
your body. Go to bed, son. Take care of yourself.'
Meredith
with her American sweetness.
We don't think you're psychic.
Plastic buckets for the mussel shells, dew collecting
on the streamers they'd hung along the fence.

It was almost too good to bear, this home, these friends. Audrey was in love with
them all.

‘They're such good value. The other day I took a sub for Father Wallace—' Adam was
saying.

‘Father Wallace
.
'

‘Yes, Nicholas, turns out you get those at a private Anglican school. It's very reverend,
tra la la, anyway, I had to take the big guy's Year 9 ethics class. So the first
thing I said was
Who can explain briefly to the class what euthanasia is?
And this
girl's hand shoots up, and she goes, “Once I had a cold for, like, three weeks, so
Mum took me to the naturopath and she said I had a really bad immune system? And
she gave me these euthanasia tablets?”'

‘Fuck
off
,' said Ben.

Their laughter rang out in the night. Audrey watched them. She realised she'd stopped
expecting the worst, or waiting for it. The thought was a magnesium flare in her.

Nick glanced up at her standing in the shadow. He held out his hand. She came flying
across the grass to join him.

Acknowledgments

Much of my time editing this book was spent as a fellow at Glenfern. I'm indebted
to Writers Victoria, the Readings Foundation and Glenfern's Iola Matthews for the
time and space.

Thank you to Toni Jordan, Sam Cooney and Clare Renner, judges of the 2014 Victorian
Premier's Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript, for shortlisting this novel,
and to the Victorian State Government for their continued support of the prize. To
Sam Twyford-Moore, Jen Mills, the Emerging Writers' Festival, the Wheeler Centre
and the many others who encouraged my writing.

Heartfelt thanks, too, to Melissa Manning, Tom Minogue, Yasmine Sullivan and Kieran
Stevenson for their tireless insight and encouragement, for all the late-night conversations
around kitchen tables and through laptop screens. How lucky I am to workshop with
people whose work I admire so. To Laura Stortenbeker, my brain-twin, for being a
beautiful friend first and a sharp reader second. To Carrie Tiffany for reading first
in Tuesday-night TAFE classes, and ever since; for finding the possibility in my
work.

I'm deeply grateful to everyone at Text, particularly my wonderful editor Alaina
Gougoulis and Michael Heyward.

To the gang, for so many years of love: Tasha, Kathleen, Bianca, Bridget, Clairy,
Jasna and Steph.

And to my family, especially my parents, for their good hearts.