Our Magic Hour

by Jennifer Down

  ‘No worries,’ Audrey said. ‘Happy anniversary.’

  Irène left.

  ‘Your mother,’ Nick said to Zoe, ‘is very intense.’

  They drove across the West Gate to Williamstown, past the factories and shipping yards, past the Backwash. They sprawled out on the grass by the water. Audrey unpacked the picnic, plastic-wrapped salad rolls, and poured coffee from the thermos.

  ‘What a Honey Homemaker,’ Nick grinned. ‘I’ll have to pat you on the bum and call you love.’

  Audrey pitched a mandarine at him. It hit him squarely in the chest.

  ‘Ooh,’ he said to Zoe. ‘Punk’s not dead.’

  Zoe appraised the roll gravely.

  ‘Audrey,’ she said, ‘I don’t like tomato.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. Just pick it out.’

  ‘Here, I’ll eat it for you,’ said Nick, and opened his mouth.

  Later he went to move the car, and brought his old Sherrin back with him.

  ‘Here, Zoe, see if you can mark this. I’ll do a big one.’ He moved back and Zoe stood with her hands ready, fingers splayed rigidly. Nick booted the Sherrin, but it landed too high. It hit Zoe in the face. There was a moment of shock before she put her hand to her nose, and saw blood. She started to cry. Nick and Audrey ran across the grass.

  ‘Fuck,’ Nick said. ‘I’m sorry, Zo. Are you okay?’ There seemed to be a lot of blood. It was in her blond hair, down the front of her T-shirt, smeared with mucous and tears across her face. Audrey knelt beside her, digging around in her bag for tissues. She pressed them to Zoe’s nose.

  ‘You’re all right. It’s okay.’ She turned to Nick. ‘Here, have a look. Do you think it’s’—she glanced back at the sobbing kid—‘broken?’ she mouthed. She took the tissue away for a moment. Nick looked at Zoe’s nose, touched it gently.

  ‘No.’

  An older woman was walking towards them.

  ‘Is she all right?’ she asked.

  ‘She’s fine, we just had a bit of an accident with the footy.’ Audrey was still trying to stem the blood.

  ‘I saw,’ said the woman. ‘Do you need a cold pack? We’ve got one in our freezer bag.’

  Zoe stopped crying. The three of them traipsed across the road and stopped in front of a gelato shop. Zoe took a long time to choose, peering seriously at the bright containers.

  They climbed into the car again just as the rain started. They drove back across the bridge to the other side of the city. Zoe slept in the back seat. Nick and Audrey laughed the whole way home, imitating their own panic: Nick’s childless exclamation—Fuck!—and Audrey’s own clumsy face-cleaning skills. ‘So much snot!’ The clipped woman proffering her cold pack and child-rearing expertise.

  ‘Is that what happens if you’re a parent? Do you turn into that? Fucking—cold packs.’

  ‘The amoxicillin’s in a bottle in a Ziploc bag in her backpack.’

  At home, Nick and Zoe played cards on the living room floor while Audrey made dinner.

  ‘Let’s get that T-shirt off you, Zo. I’ll give it a wash in the sink before your mum arrives,’ she suggested.

  ‘Yeah, that’s a good idea. I reckon it looks worse than it actually was,’ Nick said. ‘Snap!’

  Adam dropped by before dinner and took the fourth chair at the table. He and Zoe looked curiously at each other. He spoke without tempering his language or topics. It all streamed on: his assignments, an article he’d read on sex trafficking, his parents, his latest session with his psychologist. He was calling her Liv now. When Audrey looked around the table, Zoe was listening with the rapt attention of a child suddenly counted among adults. Nick had tired eyes, sunken stones in wet sand. Once he started a thumb war with Zoe. Once he got up to change the record.

  Irène and David didn’t stay long. Audrey collected the clean T-shirt where it lay drying on the heating vent, the medicine bottle from the bench. She stood on the nature strip to wave goodbye. Her sister wound down the window and said Thanks again.

  Audrey sat back down at the table.

  ‘You didn’t tell me Irène was pregnant,’ Adam said.

  ‘I’m sure I did.’

  ‘No, you didn’t. You don’t tell me anything any more,’ he said. He was cheerful, rolling a cigarette. He was poking fun at his own chattiness, the way he dominated conversation, but Audrey felt Nick’s leg press against hers.

  It was late by the time Adam left. The record was still playing, but the house had gone quiet. Audrey filled the sink with water and left the dishes there. Nick took the empty bottles out to the bin. Audrey heard the muffled tink of glass.

  He came back in and stood with a hand in his hair.

  ‘He’s so much,’ he kept saying. ‘He’s just so much.’

  Something about his expression, like a man shell-shocked, tugged at Audrey’s chest.

  ‘Thanks for today,’ she said. ‘With Zoe.’

  ‘It’s family,’ he shrugged. ‘Anyway. She’s easy.’

  He fell asleep quickly. Audrey tensed her muscles and relaxed them one at a time, toes to jaw. She turned on the bedside light and read sixty pages. She plucked her eyebrows, humming to herself in the bathroom. She got back into bed and turned off the light. Nick woke and laid an arm across her.

  ‘Enough.’ He squinted at her. ‘Stop fidgeting.’

  ‘I can’t sleep.’

  ‘Put all your body parts to sleep, one by one.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Guess it didn’t work.’

  ‘Guess it didn’t,’ she echoed. He touched her face, but his eyes were already flickering closed.

  Audrey imagined disappearing through the mattress fibres. She could feel something leaking out of her pores, ready to poison everyone else. She thought of how neat and private Katy’s sadness had been. It had built up like the salt crystals they’d grown in school, climbing, climbing. She missed Katy. She was sorry beyond all endurance, against all reason.

  She wanted to wake up Nick, but she had nothing to tell him.

  At lunch Sylvie spoke for sixteen minutes without pause about her job at the bank. The waitress stood dumbly by the table, pad in hand, waiting for her to draw breath. Audrey could have got up and left, and her mother wouldn’t have noticed. She had that cloudy look in her eyes.

  For six minutes, Sylvie re-enacted a particularly spiteful conversation she and Bernard had shared the previous week.

  For four minutes, she listed the side effects of the new medication that Dr Lawrence had prescribed her.

  For nine minutes, she recounted a television program she’d seen on the ABC: ‘—you know, the man, he’s married to Jennifer Byrne—’

  ‘Andrew Denton.’

  ‘Non, non, not him. This man’s smaller. He wears glasses. He used to have a show doing interviews. He was always having interesting people.’

  ‘Maman. It’s Andrew Denton.’

  ‘No, I know who is Andrew Denton, and it’s not him…’

  The food arrived and went cold. Sylvie’s words tripped over one
another in their hurry to get out. Audrey could not keep up. She saw her mother in static: head thrown back in exuberance; hands splayed in the middle of a frenetic sentence; fork waving in the air to punctuate a sentence. Audrey ordered another glass of wine. It was all theatre and pity. Sylvie was lonely. She didn’t see her children enough. She was so happy to be having lunch with her daughter. Audrey knew these things, but it made no difference. She felt drained and guilty.

  Sylvie picked up her wineglass as though preparing a toast. ‘Happy birthday, p’tit lapin. Always a good girl. Even when you were a baby.’ The wine splashed in the glass. ‘Bernard was the trouble. Like he knew that he was an accident.’

  ‘Maman. Don’t say that.’

  ‘I don’t mean I don’t want him, or something like that. I just remember him so much…wanting things. Always crying, crying, crying.’ She jabbed a finger across the table. ‘Don’t shake your head like that. You don’t know what it’s like to have that, all the time, Maman, Maman, and knowing that you have to fix it, to make him stop. You and Irène were much easier. I remember, Audrey, I could leave you in your crib, and when I came back you’d still be there on your back. Even if you were awake, you didn’t cry. Not like Bernard.’

  ‘Babies are supposed to cry when you leave them,’ Audrey said. ‘They’re meant to cry. It means they expect you to come back.’

  ‘So I’m a bad mother because you don’t cry when you were a baby.’

  ‘No, I don’t—I don’t know. I’m not saying that. I’m sorry.’

  At last Sylvie shook out her napkin and spread it over her lap. She looked at Audrey.

  ‘Ça va?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m fine.’

  Sylvie speared a mushroom and regarded it without interest. ‘Je t’crois pas,’ she said. ‘You look like you have some sort of… deficiency.’

  ‘Let’s just have our lunch.’

  ‘I was only saying what I thought. Don’t be so defensive.’

  ‘Well, why would you say that? A deficiency. How do you think that’s going to make someone feel?’

  Sylvie was looking at the street outside, playing with her pack of cigarettes.

  Audrey drove home along the freeway. The sky was pale and wide and she was thinking about university, a cold afternoon lying on the whiskery grass with Adam. Him, philosophy: pulling apart Leviathan, reading bits aloud to impress her, fistfuls of highlighters colour-coding his knowledge. Her, social work: John Bowlby and attachment theory. The Strange Situation. Identify child as being anxious-avoidant. Anxious-resistant. Securely attached. Disorganised. Learn the signs and signals. A flat affect, a lack of discrimination between mother and strangers. Seven black birds flying in formation, a message in a crossword puzzle, a shape in the stars.

  Audrey’s throat ached.

  Her birthday fell on a Thursday. The women made a fuss. Vanessa brought her a coffee in the morning. Penny made an orange cake. The new inquest was announced in the afternoon. It was all anybody talked about. Audrey had supervision. Vanessa said We’ll both be subpoenaed, probably. She said Your case notes are exceptional. She said There’s absolutely nothing more you could have done. Audrey nodded.

  She left work half an hour early, hurried up Rathdowne Street to the clinic. It was the fragile end of the day. She sat in one of the chairs in the corridor of the old terrace with her coat over her knees.

  The doctor took Audrey’s blood pressure first, asked her to step onto the scales, made her lie down on the narrow table. Her hands were cool and broad. She put them on Audrey’s skin, pressed lightly. Audrey stared at the ceiling. It was a relief to lie still. All the while the doctor spoke in a low murmur.

  ‘You’re a student? Working?’

  ‘I work full time. I’m a protective worker.’

  The doctor’s hands went all over, as though trying to intuit something through the skin. Audrey had forgotten the shame of medicine, it had been so long.

  The doctor tapped at her computer keyboard as Audrey pulled on her boots. They finished and looked up at each other at the same moment.

  ‘You can also try warm milk or herbal tea before bed. Go to sleep later. Make sure you’re eating enough.’ Audrey sat with her legs dangling over the edge of the table. The doctor smiled indulgently. ‘All the things you know how to do.’

  Nick was waiting for her in the kitchen, sitting at the table with a beer.

  ‘Paddy was over,’ he said. ‘You just missed him. How’d you get on?’

  ‘Okay. She gave me a script.’ Audrey sat down and put the folded papers on the table between them. Nick looked at her for a moment, and reached for the prescription.

  ‘Temazepam,’ he said. ‘Woo-woo.’

  Audrey reached for his beer. ‘How’s Pat?’ she asked.

  ‘What’d you get a pathology referral for?’

  ‘You can throw it out,’ Audrey said. Nick went on looking at her, steady, but he did as she said.

  They made love in bed first, while the sky turned grim through the window; then in the shower, everything edged with heat. Audrey fell into a sleep too light for dreaming. When Nick woke her she thought it was the middle of the night.

  ‘Come on. I said we’d get there at eight.’

  ‘Let’s stay here. Nobody’d notice,’ Audrey said.

  ‘Reckon they might. You’re the birthday girl.’

  Audrey wanted to stay in bed, sleep for weeks.

  Nick sat on the end of the bed and watched her dress. She met his eyes in the mirror. She couldn’t remember why she’d let him and Adam organise anything. She didn’t want to celebrate her first birthday without Katy, didn’t want to go to those same pubs and see the same people. The Evelyn, the Backwash, the view from Ruckers Hill, the Curtin: they’d been poisoned for her. None of us can go back, Katy’s father had said. Audrey bunched her stockings together at the feet so she wouldn’t ladder them.

  ‘Tell me about Sylvie,’ Nick said.

  ‘What, lunch yesterday? She was all right. Bit manic.’

  ‘No, I mean when you were small.’

  Audrey found some lipstick and applied it leaning into the mirror, the way her mother did. She faced him again.

  ‘Once when we were living in the Menzies Avenue flats, she decided to cook rabbit, and I couldn’t bring myself to eat it. I would have been about nine, Irène was probably thirteen. Bern was still little. I ate all my vegetables and only the rabbit was left. I took a bite and gagged on it, and Maman thought I was acting. She got really cross and smacked me, and made me leave the table.’ Audrey went to the wardrobe and pulled out her coat. ‘So later, Hey Hey It’s Saturday was on, and there was some band playing. Irène and I were dancing, and I accidentally knocked over this beautiful vase that Maman’s parents gave her. It broke into five big bits, and Maman thought I’d done it on purpose. She didn’t yell. I felt terrible. I kept offering to glue it, then I just went to my room and sat there. Much later she came in and said she was going to bed, but she handed me a little card with a picture of some mountains on it. Inside was this Kate Greenaway poem about a mother telling off her naughty kid—something about not being able to kiss a teary face. Neither of us really apologised,
but I knew she wasn’t mad, and she knew I hadn’t done it on purpose.’

  Audrey picked up her scarf and stood waiting.

  ‘That’s a nice story,’ Nick said.

  ‘When she was a good mum, there was no one better. Irène and Bernie and I got a story almost every night. We learned to read really quickly.’ She remembered something she hadn’t thought of in years. ‘When she undressed us for a bath, she used to pull our shirts over our heads and say skin a bunny. She must have learned it from Dad.’ She said it the way Sylvie had, slipped in and out of the accent the way she always did when she mimicked her mother.

  Nick ran his thumb along her hairline. ‘I like trying to picture you as a child,’ he said.

  The pub was warm. A handful of her friends from work were standing by the open fire. They turned to her. Audrey tried to remember what to do.

  ‘We were just talking about the Dillons. Chelsea has to do a visit on Monday.’

  ‘Yeah, if Mr Dillon can stop shaking the baby long enough to open the door to me—happy birthday, darl, anyway—’ If anyone had heard their conversation, they might have been appalled, Audrey reflected, especially romantics like Adam. She found him outside in the beer garden.

  ‘What are you doing out here by yourself?’ She sat down beside him.

  ‘Happy birthday! Give us a kiss. Have you been here long?’

  ‘Fifteen minutes. Are you all right?’

  ‘I was on the phone. Are you coming to Minh’s gig after? He’s playing at the Tote.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘All right! I’ll call him.’ Audrey realised he was waiting for her to leave. She raised her eyebrows. Adam blushed, and pulled out his cigarette papers. Audrey finished her drink. ‘I’m going back in. It’s too cold out here.’

  Back inside Audrey looked for Nick and found Suze instead.