Jennifer Down was born in 1990. Our Magic Hour was shortlisted for the 2014 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript. Her work has appeared in the Age, Sydney Morning Herald, Saturday Paper, Australian Book Review, ABC’s The Drum and Blue Mesa Review. She writes a monthly column on words and language for Overland.
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© Jennifer Down 2016
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Cover and book design by Imogen Stubbs
Typesetting by J&M Typesetting
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
Creator: Down, Jennifer, author.
Title: Our magic hour / by Jennifer Down.
ISBN: 9781925240832 (paperback)
ISBN: 9781922253477 (ebook)
Subjects: Australian fiction.
Love stories.
Melbourne (Vic.)—Fiction.
Dewey Number: A823.4
For my parents, and for Sophie and Lilly.
All The World Was Alive
For months afterwards Audrey tried to make sense of things. She wanted to remember what had happened.
She knew one morning she’d put on Horses and paraded around in front of Nick. Jerky shoulders, wishbone legs. She was wearing his shirt. It fell to her knees; the sleeves swallowed her hands. He sat at the kitchen table and pretended to ignore her until he couldn’t, then he said You look like you’re about to perform an autopsy, and she flapped the cuffs at him and said I can’t! I’ve got no hands! and he said Come here, you idiot. They made love in the backyard while the tea and toast went cold. The threadbare towels hung stiff on the clothesline. That was a morning hazy with heat.
Katy had called one night.
‘My shift finishes in an hour. Do you want to get tea? Just us?’
Audrey drove to her side of the city. They took fish and chips to Stony Creek Backwash, sat under the bridge in the cooling hour. It was just them and the gulls. The factories were quiet.
‘This is my favourite view of the city,’ Katy said.
‘Mine’s Ruckers Hill. Reminds me of living with your parents. Trams to school.’
‘That was fun, having you sleep over all the time. Adam got so jealous. He was a real bitch about it.’
Katy’s family ate dinner together every night. Her parents umpired at weekend netball matches, took orange quarters for the girls in their pleated skirts. Audrey’s parents destroyed each other.
‘I only ever come here with you,’ Audrey said. ‘You’re the only person I know on this side of town. Is that the new uniform?’
‘Your taxpayer dollars at work.’ Katy arched her back in mimicry of a preening model. ‘You ought to see the dress. It’s awful, makes my tits look enormous. A shelf of bosom.’
‘And you get to wear those sexy non-slip shoes.’
‘I know. One of the girls said I looked like a TV nurse. You know, the matronly one who’s firm but fair, never has sex,’ Katy said.
‘We could do something with your hair—something Nurse Ratched.’
‘Get fucked.’
Audrey slung an arm around Katy. ‘There’s no face I’d rather see if I were in a hospital bed,’ she said.
Katy grabbed a couple of soggy chips and mashed them against Audrey’s lips.
The gulls wheeled and cawed for the scraps. Audrey looked across the creek to the city. Katy brushed her hands together, wiped them on her skirt. She lit a cigarette. She had to try again and again, one hand cupped. The lighter was almost dead, or it was windy. Audrey was never sure afterwards. She could only see Katy sitting there on the boardwalk: navy skirt, ankles crossed primly, face a rictus of effort as she tried to light her cigarette.
There’d been a housewarming one night. Audrey knew because there were photos. Patrick fussing with the camera. Hang on, hang on. She and Nick standing by a window with a heavy curtain, arms around each other. Audrey’s cheeks ached. Nick slid his hand down the back of her jeans.
‘You’re smiling like a nice Liberal couple,’ Paddy said.
Audrey laughed, and that was when he took the photo. ‘A pair of young homeowners who do it missionary style,’ he said. Audrey stretched up on her toes to bite Nick’s earlobe and the camera flashed again. Paddy moved on. Nick said That won’t look like us at all. They hid behind the curtain to kiss like a couple of kids.
By the time the pills hit at last they’d already started home. They looked at each other in the back of the cab. Everything was funny. In the shower Audrey said Make it hot.
‘Pill chills,’ said Nick.
The air conditioning broke at work around that time. There were no windows in the conference room. Audrey dragged in one of the ancient portable units, the kind that only shift hot air around a room. On the way back to the office she’d stopped to buy the kid an icy pole.
Audrey emptied the pencil case onto the table.
‘How old are you, Hayley?
‘Five.’ The skin around her mouth was stained red like a birthmark.
Audrey traced her own hand on a piece of paper, then the child’s.
‘Audrey?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Can we go on the floor? I like lying on my tummy when I’m drawing.’
‘Of course we can. Grab the textas.’
‘Brady has connecter pens but I’m not allowed to use them.’
‘You can use as many of these as you want.’
Audrey sat beside her on the carpet. Someone had scratched BETH PIG CUNT into the side of the table. She spread the paper in front of them. Two sheets, two red outlines of hands. How many fingers are there, Hayley? The child’s hair was in a ponytail and damp strands stuck to the back of her neck. Can you tell me about five people you can talk to when you feel sad? Or five people you can tell a secret to? It was slow work.
The air conditioning was broken for three days, but a cool change came through before then, and it stopped feeling so urgent. That might have been the week when the newborn baby died in a parked car, or it might have been the week the inquest was announced. After a while it was hard to be sure.
Audrey went to see her mother one afternoon. Must have
been the Saturday. Visits to Sylvie began with the long drive out to the peninsula. Audrey kept watch for the familiar markers: the silos under the Nylex clock as she slipped on to the freeway; the overpasses; the flat ugly road lined with native trees; the hill in Frankston where you could look back and see lights dotting the bay line. The guilt and forgiveness happened in the car, like a Catholic ritual. Audrey’s knowledge of Christianity was patchy, censored by her father, but she’d read about indulgences. Exceptional forgiveness; less time in purgatory.
The drive was longer than the visit. Sylvie was in the shower when she arrived. Audrey sat on the end of her mother’s bed and listened to the monologue drifting from the bathroom. Sylvie spoke mostly about getting older. She was afraid of ageing, she didn’t like living alone, she wished Bernard hadn’t moved out so young, she missed their father.
‘What if I paint your nails?’ Audrey said.
‘No, I don’t want it.’
‘Come on. You’ll feel better.’
Audrey chose the colour: ballet pink. They sat at the kitchen table, Audrey holding her mother’s bony fingers. She still wore her wedding band. She regarded Audrey impassively, giving the occasional murmur to point out where the varnish was too light or had smudged onto her cuticles. Audrey worked with her face bent close.
‘There. All done,’ she said. ‘See—they’re nice.’
Sylvie looked at her with such open, childish gratitude that Audrey was disarmed.
After her nails dried Sylvie smoked a cigarette by the sink, her features puckered. Audrey waited at the kitchen table. She felt twelve again.
‘Je vais faire du thé. T’en veux?’
‘Non, Maman. Sit down and relax for a moment.’
‘How’s your brother?’ Sylvie asked.
‘I don’t know. I haven’t seen him in a while.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’ve been busy,’ said Audrey. ‘I called Bernard on Thursday. He said he’d been to school.’
Sylvie stubbed out her cigarette and flicked the butt into a potted maidenhair fern. She looked at the white wall, where a shadow of the jacaranda outside was stencilled. She began to twist her knuckles.
‘Your sister calls me every second night,’ she said. ‘She has news.’
‘Irène’s always been the one with the emails and photos.’
‘You don’t like talking to me.’ Sylvie was winding up.
Audrey looked at photographs lined up on the sideboard. ‘Have you been taking your medicines?’ she asked.
‘Of course I take the medicines. Sois pas condescendante avec moi.’
‘I just wanted to make sure.’
‘You just wanted to make sure. Why don’t you make sure your brother is okay? Why don’t you call me more?’
Audrey picked up her handbag. ‘I don’t need to sit here and listen to this.’
‘C’est bien le problème. You never want to listen to me.’
‘I’m going to leave now,’ Audrey said.
Her mother’s cheek smelled of talcum powder and tobacco. As Audrey closed the door she knew that Sylvie would still be watching the murky projections of the branches on the wall.
Audrey and Nick lay on the couch with the pedestal fans spinning.
‘How was your mum?’ he asked.
‘Twitchy.’ She turned to him and touched the neck of his T-shirt. ‘I’m scared I’m going to be like her.’
He kissed her. ‘You won’t be,’ he said.
Another morning—Sunday, Audrey knew, because Adam had told her—Katy and Adam ate breakfast at the Espy. They went back to his place past the market stalls and the flats. Audrey could picture it: Adam chattering, jubilant; Katy pulling her hair into a braid as they walked. Him in a crumpled jacket, her in a sundress. They would have sat on the lawn, played at lazy fantasies.
‘What about him?’ Katy tilting her head.
‘In the cowboy shirt? Nah,’ Adam said. ‘Couldn’t compete with a good wank.’
They cackled on their backs, legs in the air like beetles.
It was hard to keep track of days. Eventually there came a time when Audrey thought she’d been at that Sunday breakfast, too. The markets swarming below, the ferry getting smaller as it heaved away from the mainland. All three of them hungover, collapsing on the grass together.
What Audrey knew for certain was: on Sunday evening, she and Nick made dinner for their friends. Emy brought flowers and a cake.
Katy stood at the bench with a knife and carved radishes into tiny flowers. ‘You put a knob of butter on it’—she held one up—‘and then you dip it in sea salt. Mum used to do them for dinner parties. They’re the best. Here—open your mouth.’
Audrey couldn’t remember what time Adam arrived, or which of Nick’s friends were there. Probably Patrick, maybe Mark and Yusra.
Everyone crowded into the kitchen until Nick had the fire pit going. They ate in the backyard, plates balanced on knees, while their faces got shadowy.
‘When I was a kid, I used to speak with this really Strine accent,’ Emy said, ‘but once I was a teenager, it was more about how I dressed—like, when I started uni I had this horror of being mistaken for an international student. Isn’t that awful. I wore Doc Martens every single day.’
‘Because you were really alternative,’ Adam grinned. She kicked his shin.
‘Look at you in that sweater, you willy,’ Katy said. ‘I don’t think you’re in any position to judge.’
They sat close together. It was a long dusk.
Nick and Emy washed the dishes while Audrey, Adam and Katy sat in the yard. They’d known one another the longest. They’d been thirteen, plankton in the enormous high school. They still fitted together in the same way ten years later.
Adam was sprawled on the banana lounge, arms tucked behind his head. Audrey and Katy were on the plastic lawn chairs.
‘Oi, what’s going on with you and Jarrod?’ Adam asked, turning to Katy.
‘I don’t know. I think it’s just become friendly.’
‘How so?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Yeah, but it’s shitty when things like that don’t work out.’
‘We weren’t together,’ Katy said. ‘It’s not as though it’s the end of a relationship.’
‘But it’s the death of an idea.’ Only Adam could get away with that kind of sentence. Katy looked towards the house. Nick’s voice floated from the back door—You can clean that shit up. That’ll teach you to bring an uncooperative cake. Did you even do Home Ec? Nah, it’s all right, we’ll just have the ugly pieces, look—
‘But what makes you think—’ Adam started.
Stop pushing, Audrey wanted to say.
Katy was folding into herself like a telescope. ‘I don’t know, I was trying to do nice things, and—you know, sound him out, but I think maybe I was expecting too much,’ she said. Her hair, pinned in victory rolls at the start of the night, had come loose; her lipstick had worn off.
They were silent. Nick and Emy were still carrying o
n in the kitchen. Emy was bellowing I will not be lectured on misogyny by this man. Nick roared with laughter.
Katy drove Adam home and stayed over at his house. Audrey could imagine it. Adam, drunk and exuberant, leaning over the console. Kiss me, Kate! he would have said, and she would have pecked his cheek. Audrey knew how they slept: Adam with his throat to the gods, Katy curled beside him. She might have got up and poked around his things, drunk a beer from the fridge, flicked on the television.
Adam said that Katy left early Monday, before he was awake. She’d made a plunger of coffee, lukewarm by the time he found it, and written a note. Adam was hungover, late for his nine o’clock class.
Audrey could picture Katy in her old Volvo, in the same clothes she’d worn the night before, shaking a cigarette from its pack at the lights on Barkly Street. It was a sunny morning. She drove to the Dandenongs, to the reservoir at Silvan. No traffic going away from the city. Through the window was all hairpin bends and great friendly trees whose leaves were turning. Katy parked in the picnic area. It was still early. When she opened the door she heard magpies.
Audrey was watching television with Nick on Monday night. She remembered everything.
She went to get more wine from the kitchen, saw Katy’s coat draped over the back of a chair.
‘Katy never came to get her coat,’ she said.
In less than an hour Katy’s father would call to deliver the message, and Audrey would be crouched on the floor, lungs dragging, and Nick would be beside her, and the coat would remain on the back of the chair in their kitchen, an exoskeleton left behind.
When it was quiet, when Nick had fallen asleep with his hand on her back, Audrey imagined what happened that morning—
The yellow rag tucked around the hose, neat as a swaddled baby. Yellow is the colour of luck: newly hatched chickens, sunlight and stars in children’s pictures. It has nothing to do with the damp smell of death.
Katy’s hands clasped in her lap, as though she were waiting for a bus. The witness who wept as he gave his statement. He’d been driving a seniors group to the reservoir. Walking back to his bus he saw the hose stretched from the exhaust to the cabin, saw the girl’s limp head from behind. He ran, wrenched at the doors and beat on the windows, yelled through the glass.
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