She looked after Elliott the next morning while Claire worked. At the door, Claire squeezed her fingers and said Thanks for doing this at the last minute.
Audrey and Elliott sat on the carpet and cut pictures out of magazines for collages. She was amazed at how long the task held his attention. They took racquets and a shuttlecock to the big park, but it was windy and hard to play, and Elliott was irritable. Audrey took his sticky hand and they walked home across Chalmers Street. He rolled the shuttlecock between his fingers.
‘It looks like a lady in a long dress,’ he said, ‘or a vampire.’
‘We could dress up when we get home if you want.’
‘It’s okay,’ he said. He balanced the plastic feathered thing on his palm. ‘Do you like living with Julian?’ he asked.
‘He takes my food and won’t let me change the TV channel, but he’s all right. I don’t see him all the time.’ Audrey thought about it. ‘What made you ask that?’
Elliott shrugged. ‘I want to live with him again. Me and Claire did before, but I was a baby, this big’—he spread his hands to demonstrate—‘and I don’t remember.’ He shook his head so his hair fell across his little face. ‘Do I look like him?’
‘I suppose, a bit.’
‘Claire says I’ve got his mouth, but the rest of me looks like her.’
Audrey studied his features. She could only see Claire’s angles, her pale hair, intelligent brow.
‘I wish we could all live together again!’ Elliott said. His face lightened, darkened with the shadows of trees and houses.
‘Sometimes you can really like someone, but you just can’t live with them. Claire and Julian are probably like that. It’s good they still get along.’
‘Yeah.’ He was unconvinced.
Claire was later than she’d said. Audrey didn’t mind. It was good to be needed, even in small ways. But she was tired when she got home. The wind had turned light and warm. Music streamed from one of the nearby flats. The cicadas were just starting up. She met Julian at the gate: she was coming, he was going.
‘Pip’s copulating very loudly in there,’ he said. ‘I’m going to have a beer. Wanna come?’
They power-pedalled up the rolling streets, Audrey following Julian, to Randwick. They stopped by the cinema, crossed the road to a narrow bar with BAT COUNTRY in thin capital letters over the entrance. They sat in a booth. The light was fashionably dusky, the menu full of complicated drinks and craft beers.
‘I looked after El today,’ Audrey said.
‘Yeah, Claire’s got that funeral on tomorrow, hasn’t she.’ Julian was sorting his coins into piles. ‘She’ll be busy.’
‘He was talking about you. About when you still lived with him and Claire.’
‘He romanticises it. He was three when Claire and I split up. He couldn’t possibly remember,’ he said, but tenderly. ‘There were five or six of us all living where we are now. I’m the only one still left. We used to have a lot of parties. Cheap meat and crap wine. Sometimes we’d have slab days.’
‘I don’t know what that is.’
‘Everyone brings a slab and then you have to plough through it all. Anyway, Clairy and I ended up together for a few years, and then we had Elliott. We were ridiculously young. Claire was twenty, I think. When we split up, we thought we could go on living together, but being separate, you know? We were such hippies!’ Audrey said nothing. ‘Eventually El started to piss people off. He was pretty precocious, and nobody was used to having kids around. So he and Claire moved out.’
Julian pushed over his coin piles, and began restacking them in size order.
Audrey watched his hands. ‘You don’t talk about him.’
‘I see him all the time,’ Julian snapped.
‘All right,’ said Audrey, ‘I wasn’t having a go.’
He looked like he didn’t believe her.
Audrey went to the bathroom. The walls were papered with pages torn from old magazines, and for a second she forgot where she was, reading, toilet paper bunched in her hand. She wiped herself and saw she was bleeding. She was surprised. It had been a long time. She’d almost forgotten that was how bodies worked.
She sat down opposite Julian again. He’d bought her another beer.
‘This is funny,’ she said. ‘It feels like we’re kids skipping school. Killing time.’
‘We’re just hanging out,’ said Julian.
Audrey ran her hand over the brick wall. It reminded her of the one in the motel at Jindabyne. She was still embarrassed about it, about Julian being there, thinking she needed to be reined in, maybe. She pushed her glass around with her finger, tied her hair into a knot.
‘What, are you on speed or something?’ Julian snapped. ‘Stop moving.’
‘What’s the matter with you?’
‘Nothing’s the matter.’
Audrey waited for him to tell her. She could feel herself bleeding into her jeans.
‘I had a big fight with Claire,’ he said. ‘About Elliott. That’s probably why she asked you to look after him this morning, instead of calling me.’
‘Oh.’
‘She says I only see him on my terms,’ he said. ‘But I work. We both work. It was her choice to move out. We never wanted to do that “weekends with dad” bullshit. He’s still mine.’ He dropped his head. ‘I’m embarrassed now. Don’t tell anyone.’
‘Okay.’
Audrey left him there while she went to get another drink. Her hands were sticky with heat. When she sat down again, he was calm. She handed him a schooner. Beer sloshed onto the table.
‘Sorry,’ she said, reaching for a napkin.
‘No, I am.’
They fell silent again. Audrey watched the bartenders mucking around.
‘Are your parents still together?’ Julian asked after a while. ‘Mine are. It’s sort of nice. I mean, they hate each other, but they’re pushing on anyway.’
‘My dad’s gone. They were still married when he died, though.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s okay. He died of cirrhosis. We knew it was coming for a long time.’
‘Liver failure?’
‘Yes. He was an alcoholic.’
‘So was Churchill. Bukowski. All the big names.’
‘Fuck off, Julian. He was abusive.’
Julian gave a short laugh. ‘Sorry. I didn’t realise. I didn’t mean to offend you.’
‘I’m not offended.’
When he looked at her properly, when he wasn’t hedging or turning from her, she saw a flash of something like defiance.
‘I just want to crack you,’ he said after a while, and Audrey thought What about you, the way you swing from charming to shitty. When they finished their drinks they stood without speaking and rode home, single-file, the way they’d come.
In November the days were longer and the baths stayed open until seven. Audrey started swimming every night after work. She was not confident enough for open water, but the sea baths were kind. There was a chalkboard by the entrance that read B
LUEBOTTLES: NONE TODAY and PLEASE K EEP AWAY FROM THE NORTH WALL AT HIGH TIDE. In the change rooms the older women stood naked, talking and laughing and wringing out their hair. Their bodies were sun-ravaged and healthy.
Audrey had the idea that she was not particularly graceful, but she toiled away, stroking slowly but neatly, the way Nick had taught her. She tried to keep in a straight line. Things shone pearly on the rock floor, beamed their milky light up at her.
Afterwards she’d sit on the rocks with a towel around her to get her breath back before she climbed the steps to the change rooms. She liked watching the other swimmers. The older men nodded at her. Sometimes they’d ask How is it, love? or say Evening on their way in.
Some nights she sat out on the front stoop while she ate dinner. She read or watched passers-by. If they sang out Hullo as they went, she called back. She’d never gardened before, except for some straggling plants back in Melbourne, but she bought a second-hand book and planted a few things. Her tomatoes flourished, her azaleas died. She took her victories where she could.
Once a week she phoned her mother and sister. Conversations with Irène were splintered by dinner or the crying baby. Audrey always called at the wrong time.
Sylvie sounded different, several hundred kilometres away. Audrey was more tolerant. She felt ashamed when she thought of how she’d had to work up the energy to call her mother, brace herself for a quick visit. She thought, again and again, of Sylvie putting her in the bath, soaping her neck. She mentioned it to Irène once. That sort of sums her up, Audrey said. She’s always got all this drama going on, but when it’s someone else’s crisis, she knows exactly what to do. Irène with a shrug in her voice. Aren’t all mothers like that? Audrey let it drop.
She said she’d come down for Christmas. She said she’d stay with Sylvie.
In the house on Neptune Street, the windows and doors were always open. The beach towels hung out to dry, flapping brightly on the washing line. The rooms smelled of the sea and clean laundry and beer. The old floorboards were gritty underfoot with sand.
She tagged along to parties, mostly with Julian. He stayed too long, but she was getting better at sticking it out. She could remember the paralysis, trying to attach reason to her emotions, so infected with sadness she was frightened of passing it on, but she told herself she’d left it in Melbourne. She told herself she was getting tough again, building up muscles. She could swim more laps than before. The nights blended into one another. Arrive. Make small talk. Stand with whoever Julian introduces you to. Get a drink. Stand alone. Relax. Relax. Relax. It’s just people. Finish your drink. Talk to someone. Talk to the sweet boy stuck in the never-ending postgraduate degree. Talk to the girls you meet in the bathroom. Talk to Julian. They’re all kind. They’ll talk to you. You might make them laugh, because sometimes you’re funny. They all say: You remind me of someone. You’re exactly like my sister or friend or girlfriend. The everywhere girl. Have another drink. Go outside. Smell the cigarettes. It smells like Sylvie, like Adam. Dance to whatever music is playing. Get stuck in a photo. More conversation. Getting drunk. More listening, less talking. The Getting-To-Know-You Game. Sit in a circle. Take it in turns to ask questions. What is your middle name. Who was the first person you talked to tonight. Who was the first person you slept with. Ever, not tonight. Have you ever hit anybody. What’s your favourite film scene. Make up the answers to most of these questions. Probably everyone does. Party begins to end. Taxi back home, streaming streetlights out the window, hot head. Make a cup of tea. Talk. Re-enact scenes of twenty minutes ago. Impersonate yourselves. Laugh, laugh, laugh. Collapse on the couch. Watch a voluptuous late-night European film. Crawl to bed. In the morning you will laugh about how you crawled to bed because walking was too demanding.
Once Audrey and Claire lay out on someone’s dry lawn, sweaty and exhausted from dancing, and laughed until they couldn’t breathe.
Once they took Elliott to see a burlesque show in Newtown, where a friend of Claire’s was performing. For weeks afterwards he drew bosomy ladies on napkins and hummed sexy trumpety music.
Once there was a violent thunderstorm. The sky went grey-green before it split open. Audrey and Frank sat outside collecting hail in plastic cups. They couldn’t hear each other speak over the rain.
Once Pip and Julian had an argument that lasted for six days. It climaxed in a note on the fridge that read Just because we live together, doesn’t mean we have to be friends. Julian laughed so hard and so meanly when he saw it, and Pip got so shitty and twisted, that eventually they just made up because it was simpler than being angry.
Once a colleague of Audrey’s, a paediatric nurse, was late to work. Her twenty-two-month-old son was undergoing tests. They found a tumour along his spinal column. He died very quickly, very peacefully, after complications from unsuccessful surgery, in the ward where his mother worked. The whole climate changed: the grief was oppressive, they were all breathing it. Audrey’s debriefing appointment was almost a week after it happened, at the end of the day. When she left the shadows were falling. She couldn’t believe everything outside the hospital was the same, that there were things going on beyond its ruthless walls. On the train she sat with her handbag on her lap and looked for the anchors, the things that meant she was on the right line. Parramatta Park on the left, the cemetery on the right.
At home she lay on her bed in her dress and sandals. The plastic venetian blind tapped against the window. When Julian came home he passed by her room and looked in at her.
‘What are you doing, you weirdo?’ he asked. ‘Are you all right?’ She sat up. She started to explain, but by the time she’d told him the worst of it, she said, ‘I don’t really want to talk about it any more.’
‘Shit, mate, that’s the pits,’ said Julian.
‘It’s the pits for Sangita. It’s not mine to be sad about,’ Audrey said. ‘I’m just in a funny mood.’
‘Yeah, but it’s fucking rough. Don’t underestimate it.’ He scratched his head. ‘Can you chuck a sickie tomorrow? Get out of there for a bit?’
‘I can’t just flip off work. There’s too much to do. Anyway, that’s embarrassing.’
‘Go on. I’ll do it too. We can hang out.’
‘And do what?’
‘Fuck, go to the aquarium, it doesn’t matter.’
He made things simple. He did things for reasons she didn’t understand.
She did call in sick, and so did Julian, and they did go to the aquarium. They moved through the blue tunnels, not speaking much. Once Julian said I bring El here sometimes. Audrey turned to look at him, the shadows of light through water passing over his face. He was watching an enormous stingray with rapt, uncomplicated attention.
A postcard with a picture of the Yarra on it, printed in Bernie’s immaculate uppercase:
Dear Audrey, you might even be in Melbourne by the time this arrives, because today is Saturday, and I’ll probably forget to post it on Monday, and then who knows what could happen? It will probably get lost under all the shit on the kitchen bench. Meanwhile you could have turned into one of those people who jog on the beach with their labradors and join book clubs and rollerblade. Keep it real.
Things are going swimmingly here in colder climes, which are actually hotter than yo
urs at the moment. Yesterday Hazel and I went Christmas shopping together which is relationship suicide. I like Hazel quite a lot but I don’t give a fuck what colour beach towel her dad gets for Christmas. The whole thing really killed my holiday spirit.
O and my Year 12 art has been selected for Top Arts, which means it will be exhibited in the gallery in at Fed Square for the world to see. I’m very honoured, it’s all very smashing, etc, etc. The day they told me, I bought some goon and a pet rabbit to celebrate. Hazel named it Cher. It bites you on the ankles and pisses on your legs. We should have called it Sylvie. Har, har.
Hope you’re well, have a surfing lesson because I hear that’s what they do UP THERE, and also speak French and pretend you’re a tourist (I did the other day and I got a free beer), love as ever, Brother Bern
He sent photos. Now that school is done I am terrifically productive, he wrote, and I went through my art things and found these. Thought you might like them?? I don’t know how you feel about it. Send them back if you don’t want them—don’t chuck them out—B.
Audrey spread the pictures out on her bed to look at them. They were all mixed in together. Bernie, sixteen with pinprick pupils, in the backyard at Charles Street. Audrey holding her toddler niece on her hip, Zoe’s hair a blond cloud. Audrey and Sylvie a few birthday lunches ago, both wearing black.
Frank knocked at the open door.
Our Magic Hour Page 19