The rabbit didn’t die of fright. It ate all the shredded paper in its hutch and blocked its insides. Neil buried it in the yard, out near the gaping drains. A neighbour came out to protest with a mug of tea in her hand. ‘It’s the state’s land,’ she said. ‘You can’t bury a fucken bunny there.’ Neil leaned on the shovel for a moment, cigarette dangling from his lip, but said nothing. He was gentle with the rabbit. Its fur rippled in the wind. Audrey had watched from a distance.
She slid her feet between Nick’s thighs. She thought of his wounded expression in the kitchen. He’d looked destroyed at the idea that he could frighten her. She heard the first train rattle towards the city.
It was still dark when he turned on the heating in the morning. Water streamed down the drainpipes. The gutters flooded. Audrey got up with a mind to go to the laundrette. She took two armfuls of washing out to the car, and came back inside dripping.
‘It’s really raining,’ she said. ‘The gully trap’s overflowed.’
‘Do you want me to come with you?’
‘It’s all right. I’ll get the papers.’ They stood on either side of the kitchen bench. Audrey put her hand on the coffee plunger and very slowly pressed down its head.
The laundrette was cold. Audrey sat on the wooden bench and shuffled her feet over the linoleum, made her instep line up with the diagonals of the diamonds. Last night Nick had said You’re not twelve now, Spence. He’d said it to reassure her. She wanted to say, meanly, How astute of you. Thanks for making the distinction, but making Nick feel bad would have punished her, too. When she’d left the house he was on the phone to Emy already, still apologising.
Katy was the first person Audrey ever told about her dad. Adam next. They were young, thirteen or fourteen. They sat out on the windy oval, or huddled in the bike shed. Katy jumped hurdles, Adam captained the football team and then the school, Audrey always had runs in her tights. In Year 11 she read Raymond Carver for school, in Year 12 it was Toni Morrison. Katy made herself vomit every lunchtime for a year; she could do it quietly and efficiently. Audrey would wait for her outside the stall. Once Katy said I know I haven’t got it anything like as bad as you, and Audrey had shrugged, said It’s not a competition. In the worst times Katy had vomited into a plastic container to assess the weight of it, so she could know what she’d thrown up. Eventually she stopped. Audrey wasn’t sure if Adam ever knew.
They only ever saw the marks on Audrey’s body. She couldn’t make them understand that there were good times, too. Drives to the coast, Gippsland creeks where their parents had camped in a tent and she, Irène and Bernie had slept in the back of the station wagon, curled like dogs, their breath fogging the windows. The week before Christmas when they’d choose the tree. Her mother always wanted to get a small one, or a tree with a bald patch, in case no one else wanted it. Weekday mornings, her father grating carrots and potatoes for hash browns the size of the frypan. Sometimes her parents were so in love it was like a f ilm. Sylvie was bright, an electric woman. She danced to ‘Tusk’ while she cooked dinner, showed the girls how to apply makeup in front of the speckled bathroom mirror, let Bernie wear her costume jewellery. Neil was charming. He liked taking photos. They had a lot of pictures of happy times. Katy and Adam never got to see them. Once they were smoking in Adam’s backyard at night and Katy asked Does your dad ever do—anything else? and Audrey had been high and terrified but even then she knew it must have taken Katy some guts to ask it. She’d shaken her head over and over. No. No. No. He’s not a bad person. My parents are not bad people.
The washing machine finished. Audrey heaved the wet sheets back into the plastic basket. She thought of Bernie pissing his bed, aged six or seven. She’d hurried to bundle the linen into the machine before their parents noticed, then to bundle her brother into her own bed. She thought of how much force it took to open up a wall with your fist.
Dinner at Irène’s house that night. Nick said he’d drive. Audrey almost argued with him, but he was in a good mood. He’d fixed the skylight, stopped it leaking. He kissed her eyelids closed as if he were putting her to sleep. She let him.
They looked at each other reluctantly as they got into the car.
‘We don’t have to go,’ Nick said. He adjusted the rear-view mirror. ‘I’ll call Irène and tell her you’ve got gastro.’
‘No, because Bernie’ll probably bail too.’
Everything was black and gold. The rain fell like snow under the streetlamps. Audrey wished she were driving instead of Nick so she’d be distracted. She watched the smeary droplets on the windscreen. The car inched onto the freeway. The rainbow sign above the factories read OUR MAGIC HOUR.
Audrey felt sick.
Nick was concentrating hard, but he turned to her when they stopped.
‘You look a bit better.’
‘I’m fine.’ She started counting lampposts. It was what her mother had told her to do when she was young, when she used to get carsick. The rain had flooded the underpass. She couldn’t ask him to pull over. The traffic began to move and she felt better.
‘Are you still mad at me?’ Nick asked.
‘Of course not.’
‘Well, what can I do? I can’t read you when you’re like this. I don’t know what to do.’
‘You don’t have to read me.’ She could barely see through the windscreen for the rain. Nick was driving twenty kilometres below the speed limit. Audrey lost count of the lampposts and started to sweat. She made the air go in and out. They turned off the freeway. She looked for the streets and markers she knew. She tried to think of things outside of this interminable car trip. The rain eased suddenly.
They pulled up in front of Irène’s house. Audrey yanked the door open. Cold air rushed into the car. Her breath came in an ugly gasp.
‘It’s last night. It’s my fault.’
‘It’s not your fault.’ Audrey rubbed her face. ‘I got a fright. Maybe I overreacted. I’m tired. I don’t know.’
He leaned over and kissed her, hard. She stroked his neck. The terror was gone, the bile, the sweat. What remained was small and sickly. She wondered if he could taste it in her.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘We both are,’ said Nick. He touched her hair. ‘Come on. We’re here now.’
Audrey didn’t know if she could face her mother, but they pressed on through the gate.
Bernie was inside already. He’d brought Hazel, who was helping David pour drinks. She sat back down next to Bernie on the couch and answered Sylvie’s incessant questions with a beatific calm, limbs folded neatly.
‘It’s getting serious,’ Audrey said, watching the three of them. ‘She’s the first girl he’s ever brought home.’
‘Who’d want to bring anybody home to this?’ Irène said. ‘Listen to Maman carrying on. You’d think we were in a gulag.’
Audrey looked at her sister, but Irène would not lift her eyes. She worked the salad servers like oars.
At the dinner table:
‘How was Perth, David?’ said Nick.
‘Remember that time the car broke down in Kaniva, and there was a mouse plague, and there were mice in the motel room…’ said Bernie.
‘We wanted to renovate the kitchen, but it’d need to be done before the baby arrives,’ said Irène.
‘I want to do physiotherapy, but I don’t know if my marks’ll be good enough,’ said Hazel.
‘Nick, you have worked today?’ said Sylvie.
‘Emy leaves for Chiba on Friday,’ said Nick.
‘It’s really incredible to just be surrounded by that much old stuff. We did a tour of the Zapotec ruins,’ said David.
‘What do you want to do for your birthday, Maman?’ said Audrey.
‘Audrey, you drink too much,’ said Sylvie.
Bernie smirked. ‘Runs in the family.’
Audrey felt something give. She set her wineglass on the table. ‘Fuck off, Bern.’
‘Don’t talk like that à ton frère.’
‘Oh, nice,’ Audrey said. Nick squeezed her thigh under the table. She turned to her brother with his idiot grin. ‘I look after you. I cook you meals and pay your rent when you forget. Don’t insult me, you shithead.’
‘Hey,’ Irène said, gesturing to Zoe, ‘can you just calm down?’
Bernie shrugged.
Later he asked for a ride. Hazel kept saying Thank you as she and Bernie got out of the car. She stood on the nature strip, face politely turned, while Bernie tapped on the passenger-side window. Audrey rolled it down.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Come on, Bern. You’re not sorry.’
‘I am,’ he said. He shifted from one foot to the other. ‘I feel bad.’
‘You feel bad because I lost it in front of your girlfriend.’
‘If I’d wanted to impress her with my acute masculine sensitivity, I would’ve apologised in front of her.’ He glanced over his shoulder to where Hazel stood, still looking down the street. ‘I wouldn’t have said it in the first place. It was just a goddamn quip. I’m an idiot. I’m sorry.’ He grimaced at the cold.
‘It’s okay,’ Audrey said. ‘Don’t worry about it. We’ll call it a night.’
‘Thanks for the lift home. See ya, Nick.’
‘Take it easy.’
Nick waited for them to wave from under the security light and disappear inside the house before he pulled away from the kerb.
‘He really knows which buttons to press,’ he said as they started up Punt Road. ‘You never take the bait.’
‘He doesn’t get it.’ Nick had the heat on too high. She wondered if she’d feel sick again going home or if that had passed.
In bed they fucked savagely, knocked tooth to tooth. Audrey pulled at his hair and bit his lip and felt something had given way. Afterwards Nick lay on his back and stared at the ceiling, and Audrey lay on her side and stared at him.
‘Just tell me what to do,’ Nick said at last.
‘You don’t have to do anything. It’s all right.’
‘Yeah, you looked all right when we were driving to Irène’s,’ he said. ‘You were all white around the mouth.’
‘I’m fine, Nick.’ He shifted to face her. Their bodies mirrored each other. ‘I wish I hadn’t yelled at Bern,’ she said.
Nick traced a finger down her arm, let it rest on her hip. She felt sharp and sexless.
Audrey caught the 86 tram to Nicholson Street when she finished at the office. She waited for Nick in the Carlton Gardens, opposite the hospital. She walked in slow circles around the pond. When he didn’t come she sat on a bench and moved her toes in her boots. First he sent her a message to say he was running late. Then he called and told her not to wait.
‘I don’t know how long I’ll be stuck here,’ he said. ‘Don’t sit in the cold.’
She walked over to the university to meet Adam instead. He was waiting for her at the corner where the old Women’s Hospital had been, bouncing from foot to foot, wearing a Christmas jumper and his spectacles. Audrey felt a rush of tenderness for him.
‘You look well,’ she said.
‘I feel fantastic at the moment.’
They started walking without deciding on a direction.
‘Have you seen Olivia this week?’ Audrey asked.
‘Yeah. I was a bit of a fuck-up last Tuesday, so I went back this morning. But we’re making the appointments fortnightly from now on. She’s pretty sharp. We cover a lot of ground.’ He shifted his backpack. ‘I don’t know if it’s sort of psychosomatic, or something? You know, I ought to feel better, since I’m spending all this money and time on a mental-health plan. Maybe I’ve almost tricked myself.’
‘Do you think that matters, though? If you feel better?’
‘You’re probably right. Hang on, where are we?’
They stopped. They’d walked as far as the cemetery. On the other side of the road, light from the residential colleges glowed in yellow squares. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s get something to eat. I’m starving.’
They ended up over his side of the city. It was almost like old times. Adam walked quickly, in grand strides; he was finishing his teaching placement, he’d gone out every night that week, he had lungfuls of stories to tell, he reached across the table to pinch a slice of pizza from Audrey’s plate. Once he stopped mid-sentence, and she turned to follow his gaze. Bernie was standing outside the restaurant, waving at them through the window, hand-in-hand with Hazel. They stepped inside. Bernie made the introductions like a gentleman, and then they left.
‘What’s Bern doing looking so normal? And who’s Hazel? You didn’t tell me he had a girlfriend.’
‘Yes, I did,’ Audrey said, watching them through the glass. ‘I don’t know if they’re really together. But she came to dinner at Irène’s.’
‘That probably constitutes togetherness.’ Adam, too, watched their departing backs. Bern glanced over his shoulder, saw them looking, and gave a little fingery wave. ‘He looks like you. It’s funny, because you don’t have the same mannerisms at all—he’s getting bizarrely Warholesque—but physically, he could be your twin.’ Audrey emptied a sugar sachet onto the table, and began tracing a fleur de lys with her fingertip.
‘I was one of twins,’ she said. She hadn’t known she was going to.
‘What? I didn’t know that.’
‘Well, there you go. Fun fact.’
‘How come you’re not a twin any more?’ Adam asked.
‘Just one of those things. Maman always said it was Darwin’s theory.’
‘What?’
‘Natural selection or whatever. Some things are better adapted to their environments, and they outlive the things that aren’t. The others just disappear. It happened way before I was even born.’ She went on pushing the sugar crystals around on the tabletop.
She couldn’t sleep.
At night, when Nick was setting up the coffee pot for the next morning, and the traffic noises dropped away, she felt that desperation start to set in, the plunging sadness.
When she did doze it was under a light and patchy gauze. She had strange dreams—of dead dogs frozen in the kiddie pool in the backyard; of making confessions in front of old high-school teachers; of kissing Nick and feeling his teeth crumble in his
mouth—and she would lie awake for hours. She dreamed she was driving with her father. It was back when they were living in the New Street flats in Gardenvale, and in the early mornings the rabbits were crouched by the side of the road. In the dream Audrey and Neil were driving, singing crazily, and then all the rabbits ran out from the grass and onto the road, and Audrey and her father killed them all.
‘We should have Ben over,’ she said to Nick. ‘I bet he’s missing Emy.’
It was an odd evening. The three of them were not quite familiar with one another. Audrey made soup. After dinner Nick washed the dishes, and Ben stood and excused himself.
‘Do you mind if I have a smoke outside?’
Audrey put on a scarf and jacket, and they sat on the back stoop.
‘Have you heard much from Em?’ Audrey asked.
‘She called me on Friday night. She was pretty drunk. Sounds like she’s having a good time.’
‘Her emails are amazing.’ Emy’s missives were sprawling, self-deprecating tales of her petty triumphs and failures. Audrey read them at work, and wanted to write something pithy back, but never knew what to say. ‘She’s clever, isn’t she.’
‘She’s really smart.’ Ben glanced at her. ‘I don’t know where that leaves me.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I met her parents before she left. They live in this big house, all landscaped, staircase, big cars. They were nice.’ He tapped the end of his cigarette lightly. The ash quivered, did not fall. ‘I’m a cook, you know? I’m sort of waiting for her to realise I’m a boring dickhead.’
‘That’s not true, Ben. That’s not how it works.’
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