Our Magic Hour Page 4

  ‘Nah, good on you,’ Sean said. ‘That’s ballsy. I just mean—I mean, he was never after the kids, he was pissed with Mum. And he came through that new program.’

  ‘There is no rehabilitation for someone like Bradley Johannison,’ Audrey said. ‘He’s not going to learn to get better.’

  Sean shrugged. ‘Good on you,’ he said again.

  ‘Would you have given him another shot?’

  ‘Look, he’s not my client. I guess I think you’re a bit more interventionist than I am. That’s all.’

  Audrey reached past him for the milk. Her coffee turned the colour of mud, of the driveway at her mother’s house after rain.

  She phoned Nick. He was ramped out at Sunshine.

  ‘Spence,’ he said, ‘what are you wearing?’

  ‘The blood of my enemies.’ She sat in the empty conference room to tell him about Sean.

  ‘Interventionist,’ he said. Audrey imagined his eyebrows wiggling.

  ‘The way he said it—like I was Thatcher.’

  ‘Maybe he was coming on to you,’ Nick said. ‘Maybe he’s got a thing for—what did he call you?—ballsy women. Fuck him. Don’t doubt yourself. Everyone else in that office wants to adopt you. Have you told Vanessa?’

  She went for drinks with the other workers. Audrey liked being friends with older women, liked the stories about their children and husbands. Audrey could not relate: her only point of reference was Zoe, and she saw her only occasionally. These women’s kids dressed up as hotdogs for school plays and put gumnuts up their noses and masturbated in the cubby house. Audrey sat with her wine and her disbelief, never saying a word. When she left it was after midnight. She wondered if Nick was still awake.

  ‘Hey! Audrey!’ She turned around. Emy was sprinting down Sydney Road in heels. Audrey held out her arms and Emy fell against her, breathless. ‘Are you going home? I’m fucked. I’ve got to be up at five-thirty again tomorrow. Do you want to get a cab together?’ she asked.

  In the taxi Emy leaned her head on Audrey’s shoulder. ‘I haven’t seen you since the funeral,’ she said. ‘How’s Adam doing?’

  ‘He’s missing Katy. He won’t leave his apartment.’

  ‘I called the other night and he bit my head off. I wish there was something I could do.’

  ‘They’d been friends for a long time.’

  ‘And you, too,’ Emy said. She sat up. Her glasses sat crookedly across her nose. Audrey wanted to kiss her.

  Emy yawned. ‘I’ll call him tomorrow. See if he wants to come out and get breakfast on the weekend. I’ll tell him I want him to give an assessment of Ben. You and Nick should come, too.’

  ‘How’s it going with Ben?’

  ‘So good,’ said Emy. She lolled across the back seat, rested an elbow against the window. ‘Really easy?’

  They looked at each other in the grey shadows. Nicholson Street flashed by outside the window, weeknight-sleepy.

  After work Audrey took the tram through the city to St Kilda. She stood opposite three private-school boys in blazers. They could have only been twelve or thirteen. They were eating Wizz-Fizz, scooping the sherbet out with their index fingers, and watching the floor show: a junkie couple screaming at each other at the far end of the carriage.

  ‘You waited till you got home with those fucken sores on your cock, and then you called her.’

  ‘You’re a fucken headcase, that’s right, I don’t know your number and I don’t wanna know you.’

  Audrey tried not to listen but her jaw was clenched. It was dusk. The sun flashed in orange points between the buildings.

  In supervision that afternoon her manager Vanessa had asked about Katy. Audrey was not prepared. She was sitting with manila folders in her hands. Vanessa was saying It’s not the ideal caseload, and Audrey was saying It’s okay, it’s manageable, and then Vanessa said How are you going, anyway? How’s your pain?

  Audrey asked Vanessa about training in infant mental health. It was a clumsy change of subject.

  Nick described pain on a one-to-ten scale. It was how he was trained to ask patients. Audrey had questioned it. It’s not discrete, she’d said, And anyway, pain is relative—and he’d kissed her and laughed and said it was only an assessment tool.

  The schoolboys were gone. Where they’d sat, a man in a suit was brushing the knots from his daughter’s hair. Her fingers worked a hair elastic.

  Audrey looked away.

  Adam’s car was gone. Audrey climbed the two flights of concrete stairs and sat on the step outside his door. A middle-aged man came out of the next apartment and surveyed her as he locked the screen door. He said Good day and moved past her towards the stairs.

  Audrey walked to the end of the landing. She looked down at the street, held out her hands to the air. She sat in front of his apartment again. She waited for twenty minutes before Adam appeared, carrying a couple of plastic shopping bags.

  ‘Oh, shit! Sorry, Spencer, have you been waiting long?’

  ‘It’s okay, I just got here.’

  Audrey realised she’d been expecting something terrible, but Adam was clean-shaven, clear-eyed. He pulled a bottle of Omni out of the fridge. ‘It’s happy hour,’ he announced, and poured them each a glass.

  They sat on the couch.

  ‘You look better,’ Audrey said carefully.

  ‘I feel a bit better,’ Adam said. ‘I just keep having these dreams.’ ‘What sort?’

  ‘I don’t know. Weird dreams. Like I dreamed I was the one who found her in the car. I keep having that one. And I dreamed you died, and I had to tell your mother, and—you can imagine—she lost her shit. We were in a schoolyard.’ Audrey said nothing. Adam took out his cigarette papers. ‘I had a dream I married her.’

  ‘That’s a funny thing to dream of,’ Audrey said.

  Adam shook his head. ‘You’re my best friend, but I would have married her.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What I said. I fucken love you, Spence, but she is…the kind of girl you’d marry. She’s so warm. You’re hard.’

  ‘Hard.’ Audrey hated the catch in her voice.

  Adam didn’t look up from his tobacco pouch. ‘We have to squeeze things out of you. But she used to tell us everything, you know? That’s why I don’t get it. What she did. I just feel so abandoned.’

  Before she had time to realise, he’d pressed his mouth to hers. His hands bracing her cheekbones, leaning in and over her; soft lips, strong mouth.

  Audrey pulled away. Adam put his face to her neck and let out a cavernous groan. She stroked his hair, felt the firmness of his skull.

  ‘Come on, Adam, you don’t want to do this with me.’

  He gave a heaving sigh and put a hand over his eyes. ‘Oh, fuck it. Fuck this. I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s okay.’

  ‘No, it’s not. Everything’s turned to shit.’

  His skin was hot beneath her hands.

  Nick was waiting for her with some flaccid pizza. He was engrossed in Law & Order, but Audrey couldn�
�t pick up the storyline. She pushed the pizza around. The grease stains on the bottom of the box reminded her of inkblots. She got up and tipped the crusts into the bin. Katy’s jacket was still on the back of the chair in the kitchen. Audrey fingered its collar. She shrugged into it and rolled up the cuffs. It came almost to her knees. She went back into the lounge room wearing it.

  Nick hadn’t moved. He glanced up at her.

  ‘Oh, Spence,’ he said. Audrey could see he was trying to gauge the spirit in which she’d done it. ‘It looks so different on you,’ he said at last. ‘It was a jacket on her, but it turns you into a detective, or something. You look like a small bloke.’

  Audrey sat down beside him.

  ‘Adam kissed me today,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah? How was it?’

  ‘Like kissing my brother. Oh, come on,’ she said, and corked his arm. ‘It’s not funny.’

  ‘He’s pretty messed up, isn’t he. Oh, listen,’ he said, ‘I worked out where that smell was coming from.’

  ‘Where?’

  She followed him back into the kitchen. On the mantel above the fireplace was a vase of rotting flowers. The water was rancid.

  ‘Are they the ones Emy brought that night?’ Audrey said. Up close the smell was putrid. ‘I can’t believe we didn’t see them.’

  She carried it out the back door, Nick trailing her, picking up the dry petals that fell away. Audrey tipped the yellow water down the gully trap. She set the vase on the bricks, wiped her nose with her wrist. The smell was in the back of her throat.

  ‘How come you didn’t chuck them out when you found them?’

  ‘I wanted you to see it,’ Nick said.

  Before bed Audrey stood in front of the bathroom mirror and filled the sink with water. Nick was stretched out on the mattress like a great praying mantis. She could see his legs and feet reflected in the mirror. They spoke to each other through the doorway.

  ‘Do you reckon she meant to do it?’ he asked.

  Audrey turned off the tap and leaned over the sink. Stop speaking like that, she wanted to say. It was just like Nick to hope it had been an accident.

  ‘She drove where no one would find her and locked all the doors,’ Audrey said. ‘Of course she meant it.’

  ‘No, but—what do you think happened?’

  Audrey rubbed the washcloth over her eyes. Her mascara left two uncertain smudges like moth wings on the fabric. She wrung it out again.

  ‘I was scared of her when we first met,’ Nick said.

  ‘Scared.’

  ‘Well, intimidated, I guess. She was so protective of you. I don’t think she ever actually said she’d cut off my balls, but the threat was always there.’

  ‘Stop it. I’m going to cry,’ Audrey said, but she was holding the washcloth over her mouth.

  Nick went on. ‘It was almost an aggressive kind of loyalty? She loved you all so much.’

  ‘Just not herself.’

  Audrey remembered sitting on Katy’s couch when she’d first started seeing Nick. I’m trying to work out how much I like him, she’d said. Just think, Katy said. Next time you’re in bed cuddling or whatever, just think, ‘If he died in my bed right now, how upset would I be on a scale of one to ten?’ Audrey had spilled beer on the carpet laughing.

  She pulled the bathroom window to. The nights were getting cold.

  They didn’t know how to talk about it. Nick had sounded as though he were talking about a person still alive: his voice was no more strangled, no deeper than usual.

  ‘Audrey.’

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘Come and lie down next to me.’

  She turned and stood in the doorway, holding the dripping washcloth. Nick was on top of the covers. His hands, balled into fists, covered his eyes.

  The Cooling Hour

  Nick got up before it was light to take his grandad to the Anzac Day service. Audrey watched him dress. He stuffed his old woollen beanie into his pocket, grabbed his wallet from the dresser. He turned off the lamp and told her to go back to sleep.

  The muddy light was struggling through the window when she woke again. Nick was climbing onto the bed. Water droplets hung from his nose and eyelashes.

  ‘You’re soaking wet,’ Audrey said. She sat up and put a hand to his cold neck. He was still wearing his hat.

  ‘Not much gets past you.’ He pulled off his saturated T-shirt. Audrey rolled on top of him and pinned his chest between her thighs.

  ‘Is it next weekend that you get your three days starting Friday?’ she asked.

  ‘Weekend after,’ Nick said. ‘Why?’

  ‘I want to get out of the city. I’m going to book something.’

  ‘That’s very wild and spontaneous for you.’

  She leaned forwards and kissed him. He pretended to struggle, but she held him down.

  It rained silvery and thick. They went to Nick’s parents’ for lunch. Audrey sat with his mother in the kitchen while the television bellowed football in the next room.

  In a simple way, Audrey liked Nick’s family better than her own. She envied his modest, happy childhood. She envied him his younger brother, who captained sports teams and did his homework and got clumsy-lucky with girls; his father, who had a Monty Python quote for every occasion.

  Audrey’s father had been an academic. He taught French history, the Revolution. He liked stories of grandeur and triumph, the process as the result. Their house was full of books. The Protestant Reformation. Signs and Symbols in Brecht. The New Orpheus. The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism. He read less after he lost his job, but even in the commission flats his books had made little columns on the bathroom tiles, propped up lamps in the living room, overflowed from milk crates by the front door. There was an illustrated children’s bible, given to them by Sylvie’s parents, of which Neil did not quite approve. Audrey had read it lying on top of the ducted heating vents. She rarely got further than the first few pages—Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, the Tower of Babel, all technicolour savagery. Neil was always sure to remind her it was a myth. He liked to say, in his embarrassing French accent, Je suis un homme raisonnable.

  How it began was, Neil went to France to study. He could not speak the language. He met Sylvie. He was in love—with her, but also with the idea of marrying an exquisite dark-haired woman who propped her chin in her hands and adored him. He didn’t finish the PhD and she came back to Australia with him: Fuck knows why, they’d both say later and laugh, and it became their private joke. Things were simpler back then. Neil loved reading and learning. Sylvie loved listening to him. She had not finished high school. She thought he was the sun. They went to the beach, to the pub, to the promontory for the weekend. He studied; she worked odd jobs. They got married and had children: one, two; they could no longer afford to be adolescent and adventurous. Things started to disintegrate. Neil got a proper job. Sylvie stopped working and started fucking somebody she met at the library. At the library, said Neil incredulously. He cried in front of her, on his knees, and she pressed his head to her belly and stroked it lovelessly. She was ashamed. She stopped seeing the man from the library. They h
ad a third child, and somehow they struggled on. It was hard for Neil to find work. It was hard for him to be at home with the children. It was hard for him to stop drinking.

  Sylvie sometimes said He was a very calm man when we married, as though Irène and Audrey were somehow to blame. She’d always been flustered trying to explain things to the doctors in Emergency, as though it were a shock each time.

  Whenever Audrey visited the bathroom in Nick’s childhood home, she paused in the hall to study the photos of him and his brother as kids, grinning and impossibly skinny. Nick, the big brother, with his arm around Will at a surf beach somewhere. Nick asleep on his bed in his jocks, aged maybe seven. School photos, bashful teenage smiles, angry skin. A seaside holiday, a tent in a wet forest. There was an early photo of Nick and Audrey at a costume party, dressed as Richie and Margot Tenenbaum. An odd picture for hanging; Audrey barely recognised herself.

  In the kitchen Paula was slicing a teacake into fat wedges.

  ‘How’s your mum, love?’ she asked.

  Audrey reached for the plates. ‘She’s okay at the moment. My niece Zoe started prep this year, and Maman’s obsessed. She calls her every night so she can listen to Zoe do her reader.’

  A sudden volley of cheers from the television. Nick’s grandad: ‘Other bloke’s built like a brick shithouse. Didn’t think Dempsey had a chance.’

  Audrey rode her bicycle to the Shields’ house. She hadn’t seen Katy’s parents since the funeral, but they checked on each other every so often. She took the long way through the Edinburgh Gardens. The light fell through the trees. It was too pretty a day for a belly full of dread. Audrey’s legs were heavy. She was still in the trousers she’d worn to work, and she wished she’d changed.

  There was no right thing to think about. Either it was Adam, moving around his apartment, or it was Katy, who got sad so suddenly, so secretly, that none of them had even noticed.