‘Mazel tov,’ he said under his breath, as though it were a curse. Audrey laughed. She picked up her glass and went out to the backyard.
Julian was by the side of the house on his own. He offered her a joint. She shook her head.
‘No,’ Julian said, ‘you wouldn’t.’
She watched him exhale. She leaned against the fence with her arms crossed, one foot crooked against the warm bricks. The party sounds and music were muffled from where they stood, surrounded by bamboo and hazel trees, lurid hibiscus.
Just before midnight Claire pressed a fifty-cent piece into Audrey’s hand. It’s luck, she said. You’re meant to hold a piece of silver when the clock ticks over.
They crowded around the television to watch the fireworks. The room smelled of gunpowder, party poppers. Everyone sang ‘Auld Lang Syne’ without knowing the words. On the screen the coloured stars shattered over the harbour. Explosions of red like sequins; flares that lit up the night. Pip turned to Audrey and gave her a kiss. It left a bruise of lipstick along her cheekbone. Claire shut the door of Audrey’s room and sat on the floor to crush a diamond-shaped pill on the back of her work diary. She looked up at Audrey helplessly, holding her Medicare card. ‘I wasn’t thinking,’ she laughed. ‘It’s all gone in the fucking divots where the numbers are. Do you want some?’ In the backyard they wrote their names in the air with sparklers and made fun of their resolutions.
Hours later, when people were beginning to leave, Audrey leaned against the kitchen bench to eat a plum. The linoleum was warm beneath her feet. Julian came in and kissed her very hard, very slowly, and he was so assured that Audrey didn’t even have time to be surprised. He held her face. He touched her lips with his thumbs. When Pip walked into the kitchen they separated as though underwater.
‘I just wanted—’ Pip said. She looked at the two of them. ‘I just came to get another beer, doyouwantone?’
‘No thanks,’ said Audrey. Pip left. Julian pressed his cheek against Audrey’s and they kissed again. She was up against the fridge, his hand under her shirt, his knee between her thighs.
‘I’m getting to know you,’ he said in her ear.
Audrey stiffened. Julian pulled away.
‘Sorry,’ she said.
‘Okay,’ said Julian, holding up his hands. He left her there.
In her room she closed the door and took two paracetamol, swallowed them dry. She thought of Julian’s hand on her ribs, breath on her neck. She’d almost forgotten what it felt like.
She watched the orange light fill the room, heard the dogs begin to bark, a few cars start up. She crept to the bathroom and stood under the shower. She lay in bed again with her wet hair wrapped in a towel, touched her thighs. She got up and rode her bicycle through the sleepy streets, coasting down hills with her arms outstretched. She called Adam lying on the grass by the foreshore. He said Are you still drunk? and she said Yes, I feel fantastic, and he laughed. He was antsy about a job interview he’d had before Christmas. He had a string of what-ifs for her to counter. Riding home, f lashes of bougainvillea over the tops of fences, brown Christmas trees on nature strips, bottles and soggy streamers in the gutters.
She leaned the bike against the side of the house. Pip was flicking through a catalogue in the kitchen.
‘Morning,’ Audrey said. She set the kettle to boil. ‘Is Julian gone?’
‘Getting breakfast with Frank and Tess.’ Pip licked her fingertip to turn the page. ‘If you want to fuck him, just do it. Don’t creep around, and pretend to be worried about changing the momentum, or whatever. I don’t care. Just do it.’
Audrey poured herself a coffee. She handed a mug to Pip.
‘Nobody’s mentioned fucking. We were both wasted,’ Audrey said. ‘Happy new year.’
Pip dropped a sugar cube into her cup. She looked straight at Audrey. ‘Just you wait,’ she said.
Audrey felt a pulse of irritation. The light coming through the window was hitting something shiny. It was white and blinding.
In the evening she took herself down to the baths. Pip scoffed when Audrey unpegged her towel from the line, wound her goggles around her wrist like a bracelet. All day everyone had winced and said how bad they felt. I am CROOK and El has a lot of things to say, came a message from Claire. Audrey only felt tired. A small stone had settled in her chest. Just you wait.
Audrey spread her towel under the cover of the deck. The sting had gone out of the sun. She swam laps and laps. She thought about Adam, about her mother. Her muscles were burning. The water was turning thick, her blood was glue. She’d stopped counting laps. She reached the north wall and paused, panting, to look at the ocean. She wanted Sylvie to see it, to lie on her back and float here. She felt strong and alive.
‘Oi, Dawn French!’ Julian came down the steps. A few of the other swimmers turned to look.
‘Dawn Fraser’s the swimmer, idiot.’ Audrey pulled herself out of the pool, water dripping from her hair and nose. She was ashamed of her flat breasts and sharp shoulders. Her flesh was translucent and goosepimply in the cool evening; the fine hair on her thighs stood up.
‘I can’t believe you,’ he said. She found her towel, and wrapped it around her shoulders. ‘I could barely get out of bed. Soon as Frank and I came home from breakfast, I passed out again.’
‘I can’t sleep in the day,’ Audrey said. ‘It was nice, being in the water.’
She picked up her bag and they walked back up the stairs. The railing was still sun-warm under her hand.
They sat down at the top, on the deck, on the plastic lawn chairs.
‘Pip said I might find you down here,’ Julian said.
‘Did she.’
‘Yep. She was really pissy.’
Audrey pulled her T-shirt over her head. ‘Do you two ever sleep together?’ she asked.
‘No. How come?’
‘Just wondered.’
‘She didn’t have a go at you about last night, did she?’
‘No.’ Audrey stood up. Julian stayed there, legs stretched out in front of him. The sun was slipping away. ‘I just felt weird about it. Because of Claire, mostly.’
‘Don’t worry about Pippy,’ Julian said.
‘I’m not.’
‘You’re being really short.’
‘I’m cold,’ Audrey said. ‘Are you coming home?’
She slung her towel around her shoulders like a cape and struck a silly, heroic pose. Julian did not quite laugh.
They walked back slowly, not speaking much. They were strangers at the front gate and strangers at the kitchen table.
Bushfire sky. The house was claustrophobic. Audrey lifted the heavy sash window in her room. The air was hot in her lungs. The crickets hummed. Kids yelped and shouted in the street. She set the pedestal fan spinning. She lay in her underwear and tried to read. The bedsheets twisted around her legs. When she woke up the blinds were heaving and knocking at the windows so she knew the air had moved around the room and things had shifted.
In a bookstore, the one Claire had suggested, Audrey found a card: a black-and-white sketch of a bearded man wearing a kaftan, holding a stack of book
s. Underneath the picture it read The Perennial Arts Student. She bought it for Adam and wrote a quick note inside:
Dear Adam,
Good luck with the potential job. You’re going to slay it. This time in a few weeks, you’ll have a roomful of teenagers calling you ‘Mister Wilkinson’. You’ll probably have to go on a school camp. My fingers are crossed. Let me know the minute you find out. XXX
She was on her way home, watching lightning snake across the sky, when Adam called.
‘I got it!’ he said. ‘Year 7 and 8 English and History, Year 11 English.’
‘I knew you would! Congratulations.’ Audrey said. ‘We must be psychically linked. I just put a card in the post for you.’
‘I love you.’
‘I love you too, you clever thing. Go and call your mum,’ Audrey said. ‘Maybe call Katy’s mum, too. She’d love to hear.’
Going back to work in the new year she finally felt as if she’d got the hang of it. She was learning how she fit with everyone else: the parents and nurses and oncologists and nutritionists and psychologists and interpreters in orbit around the child, the patient. She learned about different types of paediatric cancer, mostly from the kids and their parents. There were tumours with names that sounded invented. There were endless statistics on survival rates. The social work department was on the lower level, with the dining area and the gardens; the oncology ward was a level above it. She could have navigated the stairs between them in her sleep. She saw the same faces everywhere around the hospital: parents waiting in the queue at the American coffee chain, on the phone in the narrow courtyard of the Chinese Garden, standing by the ATM, watching their other, healthy children on the playground. On Thursdays or Fridays the Camperdown ward staff usually went to the pub opposite the train station after work. A few times they took ciders to the park instead.
It was hard to have social energy at the end of the day. Audrey checked her phone as she waited at the station, and then switched it off until she got home. The train across the city sent her into a torpor.
A friend of Julian’s had an exhibition at the National Art School Gallery for the Sydney Festival. Audrey had agreed to go, but now she wished she hadn’t, walking from Central to Darlinghurst: she wanted to be alone longer.
She couldn’t see Julian when she arrived. She moved from one piece to the next clutching a glass of champagne, not feeling cool enough for a gallery. The photographs were suburban scenes, but tense, theatrically lit, like dozens of establishing shots from films. Audrey did not know much about art, but she was transfixed. Each picture was a new miniature drama.
A hand on her back, Julian’s voice in her ear. She jumped.
He kissed her cheek. ‘You smell like hospital,’ he said.
‘That’s where I’ve been all day.’ He was standing close. Italian beer in his hand, tie loosened, a day’s grime on the neck of his white shirt. He nodded at the wall in front of them. ‘What do you think?’
‘I really like them,’ she said. ‘They suck you in. I feel like I’m waking up from a dream talking to you now.’
‘Reminds me of Gregory Crewdson’s stuff.’
‘I don’t know who that is.’
He grinned instead of explaining. He went to talk to some friends and left her to look by herself, and she was happy, inventing her own stories to superimpose on the photos. One day I might stand like this in front of something Bernie’s made, she thought. She wanted to call him and ask about Gregory Crewdson.
At last Julian reappeared, holding another two beers. ‘Want to get out of here?’ he asked.
It was warm out. The streets smelled tropical. They walked and drank, bought a couple more beers, sat beneath the fig trees in the big park near the busway. Julian tried to explain his job. He used a strange vocabulary, words whose meanings became nebulous in his mouth. He talked about solutions.
‘We have to be the expert on whatever the client needs,’ he said.
‘But you can’t be the expert on everything.’
‘I guess it’s more that we’re doing the research so they don’t have to.’
‘But it’s essentially about profit maximisation?’ she said.
Julian drowned the rest of his beer, suppressed a belch. ‘I guess. If you want. Is that unpalatable to you?’
‘Unpalatable,’ Audrey said. ‘No. I don’t care. It’s just funny.’ I feel very public-sector, she wanted to say, but she thought it’d offend him.
On the bus they sat side by side, knees touching.
The house was silent. Julian hollered Hello, and when no one answered he raised his eyebrows at Audrey.
‘I’m going to have mushrooms on toast,’ she said. ‘Do you want some?’
‘Can you be bothered?’
‘Yeah. I’m hungry.’
‘I’ll get us some wine.’
Pip’s essays were spread all over the kitchen table, where she liked to work in the afternoons. They took their dinner into the lounge room and ate sitting on the floor in front of the television, watching a film on SBS. It was about an Afghani woman caring for her vegetative husband. Julian had no patience for it. He groaned, invented his own dialogue. He took their plates to the kitchen and washed them noisily. Audrey wished he’d shut up.
When the film ended she said Thanks for hanging out. He stood up, held out a hand, pulled her to her feet. He reached out to straighten the collar of her shirt. They began to kiss. His mouth was wine-dry.
‘Come on,’ Audrey said. ‘This can only get weird.’
‘Claire doesn’t care.’
‘Even if she doesn’t. It’s like being in a three-person play.’
He laughed into her mouth. Last year had left her with a body that didn’t want to fuck, or couldn’t. She wanted to say We’re doing it wrong, this will mean something, but she missed skin, she missed mouths. It was hard to stop.
They went upstairs holding hands, saying Sh, sh, went to Julian’s room with its window over the sea. He kicked the door to, lay on the bed. She started to unbutton her shirt.
‘Don’t be a wanker about this,’ she said. She kept undressing, dropping her clothes where she stood. Her hips moved against his, the skin of their bellies pressed together. Julian pushed against her as if their bodies were at war.
She’d imagined she’d fuck Julian once and that would be it: the end of curiosity, a small thing, someone other than Nick or a murky face in a strange motel room. Maybe they’d even laugh about it. But little stalactites of longing had formed in her, unsolicited. Not for Julian, but for that warm body, for the surety of hands.
She swung through the door after work. Pip was desperately chatty. She’d been marking for hours.
‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ Audrey asked.
‘Ooh, thanks.’ Pip got up and poked around in the fridge. ‘I’m starving.’
‘How’s it going?’
‘I’ve only got a couple more to do. They’re all deadshits.’ She pulled a tomato and a block of cheese out of the fridge. They faced each other. ‘Speaking of—I’m sorry if I sounded narky the other day. About you and Julian.’
‘You didn’t sound narky.’
‘I think I did. Anyway. I don’t care what you do. And I mean that in a nice way. Just don’t get sucked into his bullshit.’ She rinsed the tomato. Water gushed from the tap and splashed onto the lino. ‘I love him like I love my brother. We’ve lived together since uni. But he does exactly what he wants. He’ll never think of someone else first.’
Audrey reached for the coffee tin. ‘It’s nothing serious. I just feel bad about Claire.’
‘Claire wouldn’t care.’
‘That’s what Julian said.’
‘Ask her. She’d be more worried about you.’
‘It feels kind of keys-in-the-bowl,’ said Audrey. ‘Or teenaged.’
‘He is a teenager. He never changes. He always goes for the same girls.’
Audrey poured the hot water and took her own mug over to the table. ‘Trust me,’ Pip said, ‘you’re just like Magda. She was an OT, I think. Really sweet.’
‘I’m mean,’ Audrey said.
‘You’re so passive it makes me sick. Go on, then, what’s the meanest thing you’ve ever done?’
‘I was a really awful girlfriend.’
‘I’m sure you once said fuck in front of his parents, or shrank his favourite jeans.’ Pip cut fat slices from a loaf of bread. ‘Julian’s behaviour has a pattern. He had Claire, he had Sachini, he had Magda. That’s not counting all the one-time girls. And now he’s going to have you.’
‘No he’s not. We’d never do anything other than this.’
‘That’s what you think, but one day he’ll lose interest and you’ll be all cut. It’s how he works.’ Pip turned from the bench. The smooth silver breadknife was left spinning. ‘So how tough can you be?’
Too late for tough: they’d started.
Julian only came to her when he got home late, or when he was drunk and wanted to fuck. Audrey only wanted him when the loneliness was hard to bear. They didn’t talk about it. They fucked urgently, cared for as long as it took to come. Afterwards they rolled away from each other. They never slept together: Audrey would always get up and go back to her own bedroom.
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