Our Magic Hour

by Jennifer Down

  ‘Audrey, this is Julian. He’s Elliott’s dad. Julian, Audrey. She’s up from Melbourne.’ They waved. Claire leaned over the stovetop. ‘That smells good.’

  ‘How can you be hungry after lunch?’ Julian asked.

  ‘It always smells good when you don’t have to cook it yourself.’ Their conversation ricocheted sentence for sentence. Audrey felt a twinge of longing.

  Julian hoisted himself onto the bench and poured a glass of wine.

  ‘So how long are you in Sydney for?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve taken a job here,’ Audrey said. ‘I’m just staying with Claire until I find a place.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’ He faced Claire, incredulous. ‘Thanks for telling me, you peanut. You know we’ve been looking for someone to take Sam’s room.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking.’ She and Elliott were engaged in a complicated handshake. Julian watched them while he talked to Audrey: he would not meet her eye. She turned away and began to slice the bread, speaking to him over her shoulder, to make things even.

  She went to see his place the next weekend. It was bigger than any house she’d lived in, set on a corner. In Coogee all the houses had names like Rosedale and Beach-Lynn and Rosaleen Flats. The streets slanted down to the sea.

  Julian answered the door. He was barefoot, less churlish than he’d seemed the other day. He left Audrey in the kitchen while he went to get the others. This is Pip, and this is Frank. They made cheerful conversation, asked her what she did, handed her a cup of tea. ‘Oh, you’ve been living with Claire! The best girl!’—to Julian—‘She must be a good egg, if she’s staying with Clairy.’ Pip looked right into her face. Audrey smiled. She felt as if she were auditioning.

  Julian walked her through the rooms.

  ‘This’d be yours,’ he said. ‘It’s a bit smaller than the others, but it’s cheaper and there’s good light.’ He laughed at himself, a sudden, gunfire sound. Audrey started. ‘Am I doing a good job? I feel like a car salesman.’

  The room overlooked the backyard. It was paved in concrete, filled with wild green. Audrey could hear the hum and hiss of the powerline. A knobbly frangipani tree stood beneath it.

  She followed him down the hall. He was talking about the block of land being worth heaps, how none of them knew how it was still being leased except that it was an old house, something about fibro-cement.

  ‘What do you reckon?’ he said at last.

  ‘It’s a great place. I love that room. But it’s a long way to work,’ she said.

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘Westmead.’

  ‘Yeah, it would be. Hang on, come in here a sec.’

  They were in the front bedroom, his, with its window over the ocean. It was impossibly beautiful. The open water made her think of Nick in the surf down at Fairhaven. I’m pretty rubbish at it. It just feels really good.

  ‘Do you like swimming? There’s the baths just across there, if you’re into that.’

  The white August light poured in. ‘Anyway,’ Julian said, ‘have a think.’

  Audrey got hot walking back to the bus stop. She peeled off her jumper while she waited in the sun, and immediately felt the sweat chill her shoulders. She’d never lived with strangers. When she first moved out of home she was still in school. It was an emergency, it was her father with his fist and a glass-topped table and a cut that needed stitches. She stayed with Katy’s family for a while in the house on the hill. Then she lived in Preston, in a bungalow at the back of a house owned by one of her teachers. She paid rent out of the money she earned working at a newsagency after school, but it was charity: fifty dollars handed over in a white envelope each week, and both parties felt as if they’d wronged the other. Mr MacPherson’s wife taught cello, and Audrey used to listen to the gentle sawing from her window while she did her homework. Mr MacPherson drove her to school every day with his kids in the back seat. Sometimes she took them to the playground on Jessie Street in the afternoons. They accepted her presence happily and without pity, and they ran around until the air was cold and it was time to go home. Mr MacPherson’s wife always asked if Audrey wanted to eat with them. Audrey always said no, politely.

  She lived by herself in Flemington for a while when she started university. The landlady kept trying to sell her pills. The hot-water system broke in June and took three weeks to be repaired. The couple next door shrieked and swore. Audrey felt very far away from everyone. The year that Adam went travelling, Audrey and Katy moved in together. They tried cooking complicated meals and watched entire television series and slept in each other’s beds most of the time. At that time Katy was still obsessed with changing her body. There was an athletics track near their apartment and early in the wintry mornings they walked around it, Katy in her expensive leggings and runners, Audrey mostly in her f lannelette pyjama pants, their breath making clouds in front of them. They must have walked thousands of circles on the rubbery red turf.

  And then she moved into Charles Street with Nick. They walked to the Abbotsford Convent; they walked around the river, and down along the tourist drives in Yarra Bend Park, sometimes as far as the Thomas Embling Hospital. Audrey loved the way the rows of houses and warehouses and breweries dropped away into green at the end of those streets. You could imagine you were in the country. Their little house, where everything had happened in the bedroom and the kitchen, and a car out front meant someone was home.

  In the afternoon she lay on her single bed. Maybe it would be good to have other people around. She thought of the sea, the hilly streets, the grand houses. She wanted to make herself new.

  Elliott was singing in a soft, high-pitched stream in the other room.

  She moved into the house on Neptune Street. Julian came to pick her up and loaded her things into his station wagon. He kept saying Is this it? as though there ought to be more bags, more possessions. ‘Do you need anything from Ikea? We’re over this side of town.’ Audrey said Thank you so many times he laughed at her. It was sunny, blustery. He drove with his music very loud and his windows down so that people turned at traffic lights. He spoke quickly, then not at all. He reversed into the driveway recklessly, stood at the front door, hollered for the others to come and help cart everything inside, even as Audrey said It’s okay, it’s okay, I can do it.

  She sat cross-legged on the bed and assembled her clothes racks, one, two, and a bedside table. She worked quickly, instructions spread before her.

  She could hear the others downstairs, but she didn’t want to intrude. They seemed so at ease together. She laid her quilt across the bed and tried to stop the flow of adolescent insecurities. She was eight, an ugly child, always watching. She was twenty-five, and just as timid.

  But they were kind people. There was always someone to talk to. The kitchen was never empty.

  She went to the beach every night. Sometimes she walked all the way to the clifftops around Gordons Bay. She struggled over the soft sand. She wanted to make herself a new hard body.

  Occasionally somebody accompanied her. Pip regaled her with stories, and Audrey could be attentive and passive beside her. Julian was good company: he and Audrey could chat or fall to pleasant silence. Frank was a gentle gossip. When he and Audrey ran out of things to talk about, they wo
uld sing in tuneless companionship, bodies bent forwards.

  Mostly she walked by herself. At night the streets smelled sordid, all aviation fuel and overripe fruit and the ocean.

  She visited Claire at the flower shop in Balmain. She was working on an order for a wedding, masses of peonies and gardenias. She gave Audrey a handful of the white blooms, wrapped in wet tissue, for her room. She disappeared into the back of the shop, and returned in a clean shirt dress and pair of heels: Audrey went Woo-woo when she saw them. Claire lifted her apron over her head and said Do you want to come with me to deliver these? Audrey had nothing else to do, and the two of them drove across the harbour in the van full of flowers. This is a rich-person suburb, Claire said. She’d kicked off her shoes to drive. She was talking about Elliott, a house in Katoomba, coal power stations, her parents, the possum in her roof. Her conversation moved strangely; she latched on to things Audrey said in reply or in passing, and refracted them.

  ‘When Julian and I split up, and I moved out with El, blokes kept coming on to me,’ she said. ‘It felt as though they hadn’t in years, and then all of a sudden—it was as if they knew. Like I was releasing some sort of sadness chemical.’

  Audrey tried to imagine how loneliness pheromones might smell, but the air in the van was sweet. The gardenias in her lap were electric white.

  The guilt crept in at night when she stopped moving. She and Nick waiting at the laundromat, trying very hard not to laugh when a man forgot to put his washing in the machine before he started it—‘Oh, shit, oh shit,’ he’d muttered, staggering to and fro. Audrey had thought she would explode, biting back hysterical laughter. Nick did the impersonations for months afterwards when something went awry, hunching and fretting, Oh shit, oh, oh shit.

  She hoped Nick wasn’t lonely. He was still the person she wanted to call most. At night she took the blame cowering under the bedsheets.

  She wrote letters home, to her mother, to her brother and sister, to Adam. Adam’s letters and phone calls were cautious. He was infatuated with Minh, but quiet about it. I’m all right, Audrey wanted to say, because she knew he worried. I’m happy you’re happy. He was being careful not to upset her, but the censorship of his new grand love was worse. Audrey missed his honesty.

  She went to a film. She could have asked someone else to go with her—Claire would have said yes without hesitation, maybe brought Elliott if there was no one to mind him. Julian probably would have liked the film she’d chosen. But she straddled her bicycle and realised the purpose of seeing the movie was to pass time: she couldn’t bear to do nothing. She rode to the theatre. When the film finished she didn’t want to go home, but it was late and she had nowhere to go, so she pedalled back to the house where everyone was asleep. The night was airless, different to the damp Melbourne cold. She flicked on the blow heater and stripped down to her singlet and tights.

  She called Nick. Her own voice answered.

  ‘This is Audrey and Nick.’

  ‘And you have really bad timing, because we’re not here—’ His voice, laughter. She remembered recording that message sitting on the floorboards by the bed. ‘…Or maybe we are here but we don’t want to talk to you…’

  ‘It’s your turn to talk now,’ she heard herself say. ‘Leave a message.’

  Lying in bed, she was sure she could turn to iron, to something harder. She practised being very still. MON-U-MEN-TALME-MOR-I-ALS.

  Nick wrote once, after Audrey sent him her new address. Everything’s the sameish here, he said.

  The other day I was called out to a cyclist who’d been hit by a tram and gave her 6x the right dose of fentanyl. I’d been on for 13 hrs, but there’s no excuse. I realised after she’d been admitted. Everything was ok. I couldn’t believe nothing happened. Dicko didn’t even caution me.

  He’d seen Bernie once, riding his bike down Johnston Street. Nick was wasted, too wasted to be driving, and when he’d stopped at the lights he’d seen Bern’s pale face bobbing outside the car window. Nick’s mother asked after Audrey. How was her new job? Take care, he said.

  They knew how to write to each other. Audrey had always left little notes and drawings for him. It started because they sometimes slept in shifts, and continued out of habit.

  Five degrees overnight, no wonder we were cold.

  Dinner, pinned down by two pears and a thick sandwich.

  Your dad called round today, seemed surprised you weren’t here. We had coffee. Told him you finish at 6. He asked if you’d call him. Said it’s not urgent. (I think he just wants to know what to buy your mum for mother’s day.) Love love love, with a little drawing of a middle-aged man, stooping, as very tall people often do. It was a picture of his father. It was a picture of an older Nick.

  Audrey’s family wrote, her friends wrote, Katy’s parents wrote. Nick sent just the one letter, a gentle turning away.

  After work Audrey and Pip sat in the kitchen. Audrey was cutting a pear.

  ‘Such a nonna way of doing it,’ Pip said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘That’s how my nonna cuts up fruit.’

  Audrey looked at her hands. Fruit in her left palm, knife blade coming in towards her, pear flesh falling away in pretty cheeks. She had never thought there was another way to do it.

  Julian arrived home talking about snow chains. He and Pip had weekend plans. Audrey rinsed her plate and knife. The other two argued about which car to take, whether they could knock off work early on the Friday afternoon. Audrey was only half-listening. Pip said It’s only half an hour on to Perisher anyway. Her phone rang and she left the room. Julian looked to Audrey.

  ‘Do you want to come? Jindabyne. Pip’s parents live up there, but they’re in Tassie this week. We usually go earlier in the season, but there’s still snow.’

  ‘I can’t ski,’ Audrey said.

  ‘What, you never went as a kid?’

  ‘I’ve never seen snow.’

  Julian shrugged. ‘You can learn. Come if you want.’

  ‘Come!’ Pip said from the doorway, phone cradled between her ear and shoulder.

  There was kindness in the offer, and Audrey was love-hungry. She packed a bag.

  They stopped in Cooma for petrol. Julian went to piss. Pip walked half a block with her pack of cigarettes. Audrey could smell it on her when she got back into the car, and she could only think of her mother then, and of Katy, and Adam, and home.

  Audrey sat wedged beside Julian’s pack and a slab of beer. The other two chattered on pleasantly in the front. She put her face to the window. Cows with steam puffing from their nostrils in the cold afternoon. Three jet trails in the darkening sky, like a snail’s gluey track. There was no air in the grass, no wind in the trees. They sped on through the small towns, bakeries, Chinese restaurants, rest stops, motel rooms with a security light above every door. The paddocks began to look ashy. Ahead, twin red tail-lights winked and disappeared between bends. The first snow was dirty, clinging to the sides of the hills. Audrey fell asleep with her head on Julian’s pack. When she woke she saw water through the windscreen, pinpricks of light around the lake.

  Pip and Julian got up early to leave for Perisher. Audre
y heard them in the kitchen, quiet voices, running water, the front door opening and shutting as they carted their gear from the house to the car. It was seven o’clock. Audrey pulled the sheet up over her face. The light was still grey. The bed smelled different: of other people’s houses, of a room that wasn’t often slept in. At home-home Nick was usually the first one awake. He was cheerful in the mornings. He’d make the tea, bring it back to bed. Sometimes he’d sing Let’s get up and brush our te-e-e-e-th! Sometimes it was Good morning girl. Audrey missed that body. It was a grief she hadn’t expected: she missed touching skin. Even when they hadn’t fucked for weeks, and when she couldn’t look at him in bed at night, Nick would still roll over and hold her. They sought each other out in their sleep.

  Audrey went to the kitchen with the doona around her. She fiddled with the gas stove, couldn’t find matches, poked around Pip’s room gingerly looking for a lighter. She made coffee. In the portable CD player someone had left a Springsteen CD. She played it while she drank her coffee and read a month-old copy of the local paper. She stood by the window and watched two birds on the carport roof. She moved around the house and tried to imagine Pip growing up in its rooms. There were photos of her and her brother by the television, primary-school age, with missing teeth and straggly haircuts. By the door to the laundry there was a strip of wall with names and heights and years marked in pencil. In the toilet, a Leunig calendar; a framed cross-stitch by the bath; a laminated poster that read DID YOU KNOW??? About 1,800 L of blood passes through the kidneys each day. No other organ gets as much blood as youre kidneys! MICHAEL ALESSIO 3C, illustrated with a light-faded texta drawing involving complicated anatomy. Audrey thought of Katy. She would have laughed. YOUR KIDNEYS! she would have bellowed, trying for a nine-year-old boy’s authority. It would have become a joke or a catchphrase, somehow.