‘Where’d you get that bruise?’ Julian asked, stroking her thigh.
‘I don’t know.’ Audrey bent her head to examine it, an ugly blue-yellow inkspill. ‘Must have banged it on something.’ She lay back. Julian traced its outline with his fingertips, pressed his lips to it. Audrey was looking at the sky through the window. She was thinking she had to get up and go to work.
‘I’ll be home early tonight. Do you want to do something?’ Julian asked.
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know, go out somewhere. Or we could just hang out here. Watch a movie.’
Audrey was surprised, but she said Okay. He seemed pleased.
They ate breakfast together in a burst of shyness. Julian rinsed his cereal bowl and stood in the middle of the kitchen.
‘I’ll see you tonight, I s’pose,’ he said.
A patient died at work, and Audrey got home late. Julian wasn’t there. She washed her face and poked at her hair. She sat at the kitchen table. She called once, but he didn’t answer.
She took her towel from the clothesline, draped it around her shoulders like a boxer before a match. She went down to the baths. There were fires in the hills again; the sky over the ocean was hazy, the air hot in her lungs. She made herself keep going. Nothing hurt until she hauled herself out of the pool.
She dried off and pulled on an old T-shirt of Nick’s, pausing to smell the fabric. Of course it didn’t smell like him any more. She’d been wearing it for years.
She heard someone moving around in the kitchen, but it was only Frank.
‘Bonjour,’ he said.
‘Hello.’ She dropped her bag on the table beside his. ‘Where are you off to?’
‘Townsville, actually,’ he said, ‘for my sister’s graduation. She’s a PhD now.’
‘Oh, wow. What’s she doing?’
‘Something about immunology in tropical health? I actually have no clue. I kind of forgot I was going, things have been so busy.’
A horn blasted outside. Frank collected his bag and wallet.
‘Have fun,’ Audrey said.
‘Thanks, mate. See you Saturday.’ He started down the hall, and then turned around. ‘Hey, Julian was looking for you. I don’t know where he’s gone now, though. Maybe call him.’
She called Sylvie instead. She helped her rehearse for a job interview, receptionist for a motel in Frankston.
‘I don’t think they’re going to ask you these kinds of questions,’ she said. ‘It won’t be like the bank.’ But Sylvie made her ask again and again until she’d memorised responses, like a schoolgirl sitting an exam.
‘I don’t even have my diplôme at high school,’ she said.
Audrey could imagine her skittish hand taking notes.
‘They’ll just want to know that you’re trustworthy, that you can read and write and take bookings and stuff,’ she said.
‘Don’t be patronising to me. I need this job.’
‘I know you do. Okay. What are your weaknesses?’
She took a plate of toast to her room. There was a note tucked under the enamel mug of water by her bed.
Audrey,
I’ve gone out with Claire, hope you don’t mind—she just wanted to catch up before the weekend. We’re headed to the Crix if you want to join us.
Julian
Fuck you, she thought dimly.
Pip came home around seven-thirty. They watched a report on the bushfires together, perched at either end of the couch.
‘March is late in the year, isn’t it?’ Audrey said.
‘It’s been so hot, though. It’s all so dry up there. All it takes is a lightning strike.’ Pip shivered. ‘Be an awful way to go.’
Audrey went out to water the garden. The heat was sticky. Pip leaned against the bricks, keeping her company, twirling a hibiscus between her fingers. Before Audrey turned off the tap, she said Can you spray me with it, just quick? and Audrey did it obediently, without thinking. Pip scrunched up her eyes, opened them again. Water was dripping from her lashes. She laughed.
‘Now do me,’ Audrey said.
Julian came home alone after midnight. Audrey had fallen asleep hours before. He walked straight in, collapsed on the end of her bed.
‘Did you have a good night?’ she asked.
‘It was fun,’ he said. ‘You could have come, you know. It wasn’t some exclusive thing.’
‘Claire probably wanted to spend time with you.’
‘We were just hanging out.’
She watched him pull his shirt over his head, kick off his jeans. She turned back the quilt. He climbed in beside her and she turned to him.
‘When I got your note I was disappointed. You said you’d be here tonight, and you weren’t.’
There was a pause, and Julian laughed. He scratched his head.
‘Fuck, Audrey. I didn’t mean to disappoint you.’
‘It’s all right. I shouldn’t have waited.’
‘You don’t sound mad,’ Julian said.
‘I’m not.’
‘Do you want to sleep with me tonight?’
‘No,’ Audrey said, ‘and it’s not because you went out with Claire. I just don’t feel like it.’
‘All right.’
Somehow they fell asleep. It was the simplest thing to do.
Train home from work past the mason’s, MON-U-MEN-TAL-MEMOR-I-ALS, the stadium, the RSLs, the open drains, the water tower. Claire called.
‘El’s got tennis and then we’re going to the Warren View for ten-dollar parmas. Are you still on your way home? Do you want to come?’
Claire picked her up at the station. Audrey said Hi, Mum! as she climbed into the van. Elliott held up his racquet as though he were about to hit her. Audrey flinched.
‘Don’t do that,’ Claire said sharply. She swatted his arm.
Elliott looked wounded. ‘I was only joking.’
They parked on Sydenham Road, and Elliott ran across the grass to join the other children. Audrey bought two cans of Coke from the servo next door. She and Claire sat on one of the vacant courts.
‘I know this is awful, especially after the accident,’ Claire said, ‘but he’s such hard work at the minute. We’ve just been at each other’s throats.’
‘It’s not awful. What you’re doing, with him and the shop—that’s tough on your own.’
‘We’ve both been out of sorts for the last month or so. I’ve been wondering if the anaesthetic did something to him.’ She looked at Audrey hesitantly. ‘It’s silly. I’m not some anti-medication hippy. I just keep thinking, maybe it messed with his little brain.’
‘There’s the trauma of it, too,’ Audrey said. The synthetic grass itched her thighs. ‘It must have been terrifying. And he was very sick. He’d have a memory of it all somewhere. I believe in that stuff.’
‘Julian doesn’t. I tried to talk to him about it the other night. He was so dismissive, and I got to that irrat
ional point of frustration, where you open your mouth to argue back and burst into tears.’
‘Then you’ve lost all emotional credibility.’
‘Yes!’
They smiled grimly at each other.
‘He mentioned you the other day,’ Claire said. ‘He said you two had a bit of a thing.’
‘We’re only fucking.’
‘I just wish you’d told me! I don’t care.’
‘That’s what Julian said you’d say,’ Audrey laughed, ‘and Pip.’
‘I don’t! He’s always going to be El’s dad, but we do our own thing. He’s the sort of person where you can’t care what he does, or you’ll have hurt feelings every day of the week.’
‘I don’t know why we’re keeping on,’ Audrey said. ‘He makes me feel like I’m needy. I can’t be bothered engaging with his shit, but if I turn him down it’s like I’m playing into it.’
‘I used to hit him. Really belt him. He can be such a deadshit. He’d go out for days and I’d be left with El, and I’d get so mad. I used to pummel him, and he’d just let me, as though he was accepting some kind of punishment.’
‘I guess he was.’
Claire shook her head. ‘Nothing punishes him. He’s like flint.’ On the news they’d said it would be a cool night because there was no cloud cover. Audrey walked home, hugging herself for warmth. Soon it would be April and the baths would close earlier, and she’d only be able to swim on weekends.
The others were in the lounge room. The television was on, but Audrey sensed they’d been talking to each other, not watching it. Frank was sitting on the floor, a plate on his thighs. He offered his beer to her. She took a mouthful, handed it back.
‘They’re gonna sell the house,’ said Pip.
Audrey dropped her bag. ‘Wow.’
‘We’ve got plenty of time,’ Frank said. ‘It’ll take them months.’
Audrey glanced at Julian, expecting his face to be tight, but he grinned. ‘It was too good to last, this place.’
‘We had it cheap and easy for a long time,’ Pip said.
‘Reckon they’ll knock it down and build apartments?’ Julian said.
‘Oh, don’t,’ Pip said, ‘that’s too sad.’ She put a hand to the wall like it was a dog about to be put down.
Later Audrey sat on Julian’s bed and watched him peel an orange. He could do it in one go, puncture it with his thumb and leave a curly corkscrew behind.
‘My ex could do that,’ she said. ‘He used to peel them in the morning, then put them back in the skin to take to work.’
‘Your ex.’
‘Mm.’
‘It’s funny. I never thought about what you did before you came here. I mean, I know about your mum and your sister and your old job, but—I don’t know. It was like you just appeared.’
‘Sprang fully formed from someone’s forehead like Athena.’
He stared at her.
‘That’s something else about Nick,’ Audrey said. ‘He knows all of this stuff about Greek mythology because his mum made him study classics in high school.’
‘Did he become a teacher?’
‘No. He’s a paramedic.’
‘Is his mum a teacher?’
‘She works in a pharmacy,’ Audrey said. They were both cross-legged, in their underwear. Julian held out half the orange to her and she took it.
‘Where do you reckon you’ll go after here?’ Julian asked.
‘I don’t know. I guess it depends on what happens with work. Maybe somewhere around Marrickville or Newtown, if I stay at the hospital. What about you?’
‘I’ve got no idea,’ he said.
‘You’ve got money. You could live anywhere. Double Bay.’
He looked at her, saw she was joking. She didn’t want to fuck him any more. She went to the window, scissored open the blinds with her fingers. The black-and-white waves rolled in.
She turned back to Julian. ‘Maybe you’ll get a place by yourself.’
‘I couldn’t do that,’ he said. He looked helpless, in pain.
‘You are twelve years old.’ She lay beside him, picked up the spiral of orange skin where he’d left it on top of the sheets. He watched her stretch it between her fingers.
‘Go and get one from the kitchen,’ he said, ‘and I’ll show you how to do it.’
Everyone was crawling. Audrey and Pip polished off a cask of wine in the backyard. After midnight Julian came and stood at the back door. The whites of his eyes shone.
‘Me and Frank are going out.’ He stuck his hands into his pockets. ‘Come if you want.’
Pip sat up and looked from his face to Audrey’s. ‘That might be okay.’
‘I’m drunk. I’m ready for bed,’ Audrey said.
‘Come on. It’ll be good to get out.’
Julian stood there, looking at her from under his hair. Audrey shrugged.
Pip got ready quickly. Audrey caught a flash of her down the hallway: bare thighs, dark eyelids, loose hair. Audrey sat on the end of her bed and looked at her boots, at the cuffs of her jeans. She did not want to go. She felt nervous in a way she hadn’t for a long time. Pip stuck her head around the doorway.
‘Come on, you can’t go out like that,’ she said, but gently. ‘See if I’ve got something.’
Pip was about Katy’s size, but Audrey followed her into her room anyway.
‘What are you two doing? It’ll be morning before we get going,’ bellowed Julian from the kitchen. Pip laughed and hissed. Audrey stood in her underwear as Pip fussed around her, pulling the clothes this way and that. She looked at herself in the mirror, ridiculous dress made to fit with tucks and safety-pins. Her shins stuck out like saplings. She was still wearing her flat R.M. Williams boots and woolly socks.
They took a cab. Audrey didn’t know where she was; she wouldn’t have known even if she’d been sober. The streets were unfamiliar to her in the dark. It began to rain. Water dribbled down the window. She watched the lit-up clinics and bars and theatres and peepshows running past in a stream of neon, backlit shopfronts, a church. Young girls ran out on stalky legs. They huddled together under awnings, cigarettes dangling from fingers, wearing identical dresses and matching grimaces. Beautiful boys with long eyelashes, moving like phantoms.
The taxi stopped on Oxford Street. On the footpath, Frank and Pip linked arms and sauntered off. Julian reached for Audrey’s hand.
‘You’re freezing!’ he said, and blew on her fingers.
They went into a warm cave. The throbbing of the bass matched Audrey’s heartbeat. Julian was in a generous mood. He handed her a shot of something honey-coloured. ‘Here, this’ll warm you up.’
She followed Pip to the bathroom, where girls leaned against the white-tiled walls. Pip squeezed between the bare shoulders in front of the mirror and dusted gold powder across her nose. Audrey leaned against the closed door of a cubicle and watched a pair of girls crouched on the f loor as they extracted four white pills from a crumpled sheet of foil. One of them turned up her smooth face to the fluorescent light.
>
‘Hot dress, babe,’ she said to Audrey.
‘Thanks,’ Audrey said, laughing, ‘babe.’ She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been in a place like this. She would have been seventeen, eighteen, still in school. She’d never liked the closeness of bodies, the boring, panicky thud of the music they played, the speed Adam had snorted cheerfully by the door. When he’d come up to visit he’d said Let’s get some drugs, half-joking, but Claire found some pills. The three of them had sat on her living room floor, talking while they waited. It took a long time before Audrey felt anything.
‘Are you in love with everyone?’ Adam had asked.
‘I’m not where you are,’ Audrey said.
Claire stretched out on the floorboards. ‘I am,’ she’d said. ‘I’m in love with both of you.’
Audrey sat back when it came, coldness in the arms, light and colour in her eyes. Adam started one of his stories: ‘This one time a bunch of us went down to Blairgowrie for the long weekend and we had a party, and everyone got pretty fucked up. Audrey finished up spewing into the bathtub, and Katy and I were doing that sort of powerless laughing, where there’s nothing you can do anyway, and after a while Audrey straightens up, wipes her face and goes, “I’m going to go and think about what I’ve done,” like she was giving herself a time-out.’
‘The Naughtiest Girl Does a Vomit in the Bath,’ Claire said.
Audrey had felt better the next day, sailing on a wave of euphoria as she drove her friend back out to the airport. The stuff was still humming in her head.
The vibrations of the music echoed dully in the bathroom. The two girls with the pills were gone. Audrey couldn’t watch Pip look at her mouth in the mirror any longer.
Out in the darkness the floor was sticky. Audrey had another drink by herself. She found Julian, and grabbed him by the wrists. ‘Let’s dance.’
‘I don’t dance. You don’t, either.’
She dragged him into the thickness of bodies. He stood there and watched her spin. He leaned in to her ear.
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