‘Is that your curry in the fridge?’ he asked. Audrey shook her head.
Frank nodded at the photos laid out in a grid on the quilt. ‘Getting into decoupage?’
‘My brother sent them,’ Audrey said. Frank stepped closer, stood over the pictures. He scratched his neck. He pointed at a photo of Audrey and Katy at a music festival a few years back. They were grinning, standing on dry grass. Katy in a sundress, a rockabilly Venus; Audrey braless in a shirt that could have been Nick’s. Dusty ankles, arms around each other.
‘You look happy there,’ Frank said. ‘Look at how you’re smiling, both of you.’
Audrey thought he was going to ask about Katy, but she heard his feet on the stairs.
Early morning, already warm. Pip in her T-shirt and underpants, standing in the kitchen doorway.
‘I think I’m going to have a beach day,’ she announced. ‘Does anyone want to come?’
‘Oh, yeah,’ said Frank. ‘I might call Tessy.’
‘I’ll come with,’ said Audrey.
Julian grunted his assent, already halfway up the stairs.
Audrey and Frank made dozens of sandwiches standing at the kitchen bench. They told each other stories.
‘…and all he said was I’m a Yuggera man and they carted him off.’
‘He sounds amazing.’
‘He was. I don’t really remember him. He died when I was little. He was sick a long time, and Mum and Dad used to visit him without me. I think they thought I’d be frightened of all the hospital stuff. They just wanted me to remember him as, you know, my grandad.’
Claire and Julian must have reached a ceasefire, because she arrived with Elliott and an armful of shopping bags. Elliott sat on the linoleum, right by Frank’s feet, and listened to the conversation. Claire made scones like it was nothing: ‘It’s just flour and milk and sugar and cream. You chuck it in there, and beat it like it owes you money.’
They spiked the lemonade. They left the dirty dishes in the sink and traipsed down the hill to the main beach, Julian with the cricket bats and plastic stumps under one arm, Frank and Tess hauling the esky between them. Oleander the colour of musk sticks behind the fences, grimy frangipanis on the footpaths.
At the beach they spread out their things. Claire rubbed sunscreen all over Elliott’s back. He sat obediently, gnawing on a piece of watermelon, in a floppy black hat of Claire’s.
‘You look like Bob Dylan,’ laughed Tess.
‘I’ve got extra,’ Claire said. She turned to Audrey, hand cupped. ‘Here, let me do you.’ Audrey held her hair out of the way while Claire smoothed the stuff over her shoulders. She did it like a mother, moving the straps of Audrey’s bathers to the side to make sure nothing was missed. Frank and Julian had already gone for a swim. They ate dripping all over the sand and their towels.
After lunch Elliott and Julian went off with their bodyboards. The conversation turned sporadic and drowsy. Audrey ate watermelon lying on her back looking up at the sky. The juice ran into her ear. She wiped it with the back of her hand.
Propped up on her elbows, Claire admired the boys hurling their bodies into the waves over and over again.
‘I’m glad they’re spending time together. Elliott really misses him, but Julian’s a fair-weather friend. He always gets to choose.’ She rolled over onto her belly, rested her head on her long freckled arms. ‘I can’t remember things being easy with him. I can’t remember what he was like before we had El.’
Audrey pulled her hat down over her brow. She hovered lightly above sleep, strange visions. A field on fire. Shadows over a skylight. She dreamed she was living in the country, a town on a river, with a group of friends. Katy was there; it was her sister who was dead. Audrey was wearing the same perfume Katy’s sister had. All of their friends were working in shifts to sleep beside Katy and take care of her. When it was Audrey’s turn, she upset Katy with the perfume, and it started a fresh onslaught of grief.
Audrey lurched awake. Sweat was running down her ribs in the sun.
Claire smiled at her. ‘It’s called a hypnic jerk, when that happens,’ she said. ‘When you’re almost asleep and you think you’re falling.’
Julian brought a woman home from the consultancy firm where he worked. The two of them finished off the wine cask Audrey had bought, and ate the rest of the picnic leftovers.
The girl was gone in the morning. Julian ate fistfuls of cereal from the box, looking pleased with himself.
‘How’s your lovelife?’ Pip asked.
‘Get fucked.’
‘I was joking.’
Audrey had the impression she’d missed something between them, another tiny earthquake. Julian and Pip fought like siblings.
Julian shoved the cereal packet back into the cupboard. He grabbed his keys and called over his shoulder:
‘I can be prickly, too. Be friends or don’t be friends.’
They listened to him stump out of the house.
‘O-o-o-o! He’s in a real shit!’ Pip said, and clapped her hands.
It had been years since Audrey had lived with someone whose moods she could not trust. She’d almost forgotten about those roads with the hairpin turns.
You Were So Alive
At Tullamarine Audrey picked at her cuticles, shuffling from the plane to the terminal. She was hungry for the bay, the suburbs she knew.
Adam ran to her across the carpeted floor. She dropped her bag and caught his embrace.
‘Fuck it’s good to see you,’ he said.
His face was pressed against hers. She was suddenly, surprisingly knocked for six. She said I missed you. It was hard to get the words out.
The city came into full view as they crossed the Bolte Bridge. Everything shimmered through the car fumes.
‘—and I’d always imagined Minh to be sort of hard and inaccessible somehow,’ Adam said. ‘You see him playing a gig and he looks like he’s having a good time, but he always stands up the back—when we first started hanging out I thought he was so restrained, so cool about everything. But he’s not at all. And neat, the little prick; he’s always picking up my shit and putting it away, and then I can’t find it. Like Katy used to.’
Audrey’s head snapped sideways, but Adam’s hands were relaxed on the wheel. He could say her name without flinching!—She triggered in him a tender memory! ‘…neither of us can cook, so I got mum to make a ratatouille the day before and I zapped it, and his parents thought I’d made it from scratch!’
He laughed, and Audrey did too, the sound peeling away from her.
He took her to a new place in South Melbourne. It had appeared where an old pharmacy had been in the time she’d been gone. They sat for hours. Adam was boisterous and flirtatious, the way Audrey always thought of him. She could barely remember him as he had been in March, a husk of a man.
She wanted to speak about the things they never spoke about on the phone. She wanted to say something about how change had beat away at him since she’d moved. She wanted to tell him about hypnic jerks, spider tumours, symbiosis, artificial lakes. She wanted to ask when Katy had passed from a friend to a me
mory.
But there were no spaces for those things in his conversation. She was afraid that she could say Katy’s name aloud and Adam wouldn’t blink.
They scanned the bill standing by the register. Audrey looked up to see their images in the mirror behind the counter. Her own face, impassive. Adam, serious only for a moment, hairline receding slightly.
‘You going to call Nick while you’re down?’ he asked as they fumbled for change.
‘Adam—’
‘You could be friends. Heaps of people are friends.’
Audrey swung the café door wide. She tilted her face to the dry afternoon.
‘It got pretty ugly,’ she said. ‘We haven’t really spoken since. Come on, let’s go for a walk. I’ve missed this.’
Adam kissed her smackingly on the cheek.
He drove her all the way to Sylvie’s that night, through the suburbs along the beach. Warm air at the window, caravan parks, ti-tree. Audrey felt nostalgic for something she’d never had, suburban delirium and fast car rides at night, soft-serve summers. She propped her face on the window.
Sylvie was waiting on the porch, cigarette between her knuckles. She was barefoot and coltish. Her hair tumbled from its knot.
‘P’tit lapin,’ she said when she saw Audrey. She stood to embrace them both. ‘Come in, Adam, how are you? Do you want some coffee?’
‘Thanks, Sylv, but I have a hot date.’
‘How is your mother?’
‘She’s good. My dad had a triple bypass about a month ago, but he’s doing well now. Mum can’t wait to get him out of the house, she’s going insane. She’s taken up painting.’
‘Men, they are all the same,’ Sylvie said with a congenial eye roll.
‘Thanks for driving me all this way,’ Audrey said.
‘No worries. I’ll call tomorrow. We’ll go out.’
‘I want to see Minh.’
‘I’ll phone. See ya. Au revoir, Mrs Spencer.’
Audrey put her things in her room. She opened the wardrobe. There was an old jacket hanging there, dark green, hooded. She could almost hear Katy’s laugh—Oh yairs, very narce, it’s vai-r-r-y nineties teen witch—coming from the part of her brain that had still expected Katy to be waiting at the airport beside Adam.
It was a kind of doublethink, the bargains and lies she’d been fashioning since Katy had gone. If Audrey always switched off the bedside lamp with her eyes already closed, Katy might reappear. If she could guess the seconds left on the microwave until her coffee was finished reheating. If she could hold her breath for half a lap of the pool, if she could make it home without seeing any brown cars, if there were no messages on her voicemail at the end of the day. The superstitions were crushed as soon as they proved untrue, but she invented new ones each day.
She sat down on the end of her bed, smoothed the bedspread. Everything was covered in a thin layer of dust. The evening light streamed in.
Sylvie leaned in the door. ‘How are you?’ she asked.
‘I’m good. It’s nice to be home. I didn’t realise how much I’d missed it.’
‘You’re thin.’
Audrey looked at the mirror. ‘I’ve been busy.’
‘Do you have a boyfriend?’
‘No, Maman. I’m just taking things as they come.’
On the dresser was a glass case with a painted figurine of Jesus on a cloud. ‘That’s new,’ Audrey said.
‘It’s from when I was a little girl.’
‘I meant—’ Audrey meant It must have been in hiding all this time, since her father would never have allowed it, but she stopped herself.
Sylvie nodded and shifted. ‘Let me get you a cup of tea,’ she said at last.
‘Merci,’ said Audrey. Sylvie left the room. Audrey lay back and put a hand over her mouth.
When she got out of the shower she could hear the television on—evening news, bushfire alerts—and Sylvie talking to the budgerigar in French. She sat at the kitchen table with her towel around her shoulders. She watched her mother prepare dinner. It was almost nine o’clock. Sylvie had been waiting for her.
‘How’s work, Maman?’
‘I received a promotion,’ Sylvie said. ‘I’m a team leader now.’
‘That’s fantastic! You didn’t tell me,’ said Audrey. ‘When did that happen?’
‘Last month.’
‘Congratulations. You should’ve said!’
Sylvie’s back was to Audrey. Her knife went slock-slock-slock over the asparagus.
‘You all probably thought I wouldn’t even keep the job,’ she said.
‘Nobody ever said that.’
Slock-slock-slock went the knife.
Audrey watched her mother’s neck; she watched the muscles working.
‘Don’t sit with wet hair,’ Sylvie said without turning around. ‘You’ll catch a cold.’
After dinner they hauled the grey water outside to pour over the garden beds.
‘I’ve started gardening,’ Audrey said.
Sylvie seemed pleased. ‘How is it?’
‘I haven’t planted much. Just a few tomatoes, some azaleas.’
‘Ben, anyone can grow tomatoes,’ Sylvie said dismissively.
Audrey reached down to tug a withered flower head from its stem. It fell away in her hands, dry and without perfume.
‘A gardenia,’ her mother pronounced. Audrey let it fall.
She’d almost forgotten Sylvie’s turbulence. She felt that skin forming, that hard outer shell: the part of her she needed to weather it. Audrey lay on her bed and looked at her watch. She’d been home for two hours. She opened the window, changed into her pyjamas. She read for a while, and when she went to the kitchen to get a glass of water the lights were off. Her mother had gone to bed. But coming back up the hall she heard Sylvie call out for her.
Audrey went to her room. Sylvie was propped up in the double bed. The room was dark but for the television. There was a black- and-white film on. A man and a woman standing in a ballroom or a parlour. The subtitle at the bottom of the screen read You’re thinking of someone else. ‘Come here,’ Sylvie said, and held out an arm. Audrey tucked herself in its curve. ‘Do you know this film?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘It’s Last Year at Marienbad. L’année dernière à Marienbad.’ Sylvie looked younger in the dim room, her eyes fixed on the screen. ‘Your papa took me to see it once at the Astor. It was screening for a festival. He loved it. I thought it didn’t make sense.’
Sylvie’s skin smelled of rose-scented talc and cigarettes. She stroked Audrey’s hair in an absent way, held her close. It was everything Audrey might have wanted as a child. The subtitle read You were so alive.
Audrey took her brother’s old bicycle out of the shed, pumped its tyres and pedalled to the beach at Balnarring. The hardy families were just getting to the beach, setting up their sun shelters, toddlers with fat legs tugging at their hats. Audrey watched the surfers, the big breakers. She liked the uncomplicated camaraderie they had, go
ing in and out, How’s it today, mate; their healthy bodies beneath their peeling wetsuits, their dripping hair. Audrey waded to her chest. Nick had taught her how to recognise riptides once. Already it felt strange to be in the water here, uncertain in the surf, when she’d stroked away safely in the sea baths.
Riding home in the shade the sweat cooled on her neck. Sylvie had left for work. Audrey phoned her brother. He was at home, he said; he’d be home all day.
He looked the same. That mop of dark hair, that thin face that shone at her when he opened the door. He gave her a quick hug. They examined each other: it seemed longer than a few months since she’d seen him. They hustled down the hall and into the kitchen, where they sat and spoke greedily. Bern told her about his exams, about the parties afterwards, about Hazel, about Irène’s family and the new baby. Audrey listened, leaning forwards on her elbows.
At last he got up and set the kettle boiling. He went to the cupboard.
‘Don’t tell me you’ve got food in there,’ Audrey said, and Bern affected a housewifely pose, biscuits in hand, one leg bent upward at the knee, eyelashes fluttering.
‘Iced VoVo?’
Audrey laughed. ‘Listen, do you mind if I have a look at your art?’
Bernie dropped his head.
‘I didn’t mean to put you on the spot. You don’t have to show me.’
‘No, it’s not that,’ he said. ‘They’re just…nothing special.’
She followed him into his bedroom, whose walls were lined with canvases: their family in oils. Audrey was stunned.
‘I don’t really know what I’ll do with them yet,’ Bern said. ‘Only one painting’s going on display at the Ian Potter, and that’s not until April or something.’
‘They’re amazing, Bern.’
He blushed. ‘I was getting quite prolific there for a while.’
Sylvie occupied three rectangular canvases. She stared vacantly, cigarette in hand; she leaned back in her chair; she was savage-eyed, hands swiping the air. Audrey recognised her own face with a shock. Her image smiled hesitantly, as though she’d just looked up.
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