Our Magic Hour (28 page)

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 books. Underneath the
picture it read
The Perennial Arts Student
. She bought it for Adam and wrote a quick
note inside:

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.

Julian allowed her to be mean. He picked away at her weakest spots. He was triumphant
when she eventually snapped. She never felt confident around him. She was not interesting
or clever enough. ‘Let me
see
you,' he'd say. She hid under the sheets, too pale,
too sharp. She could have cut him right back, but he wouldn't have cared. He left
behind little alluvial deposits of anxiety.

Audrey wanted to think it wasn't about control, but there were hundreds of small
struggles.

They kissed each other through the plastic shower curtain. It was like suffocating.
Audrey could feel his teeth.

She took care to remember that it was convenient. She worked to be unsurprised when
he came home late with a woman from the office, the same one as before. She told
herself it cut both ways. She could do the same. Julian fucked in a hurry. He almost
always came before she did. Sometimes when she knelt before him it was with a
horrible
feeling of supplication. Sometimes she did it without looking up at him once, testing
how remote she could be. He didn't notice. She'd clutch at the meat around his hipbones
and feel it was just that—meat—and by the time he was finished her knees were tattooed
with the impressions of the rug.

A few times he got home from work early enough to walk down to the baths, where he
knew she'd be. He never paid to get in. He walked straight past the unattended window
where Audrey dropped her coins, or explained to the kid standing there—surf lifesaving
uniform, open face—that his friend had forgotten something, and could he please just
run down and give it to her. When she told him she liked to be alone when she swam,
he snorted.
Do you wanna piss on the rocks? Mark your territory?
but he stopped coming.

There were easy times, too. Morning, she was in her bedroom, scrabbling in her handbag
for her Opal card. Julian hanging in the doorway, toast crust in his mouth. ‘Can
you drive manual?' he asked.

She looked up. ‘Yes.'

‘Wanna help me do something tonight?'

‘What, move a body?'

He was looking at a bike, an old Yamaha. ‘Sounds like it's almost clapped-out, but
the guy reckons he's got a roadworthy on it.' Julian was going to fix it up. Audrey
imagined it decaying in the shed in the backyard. He was saying something about a
piston kit and timing chains, and Audrey almost laughed—
Do you know anything about
timing chains?
—but something bright and childlike in the way he was talking made
her think of her brother.

She said she'd come. The bloke selling it was up in Budgewoi. Audrey couldn't have
found it on a map.

‘What time?' she asked.

‘I dunno. We just started a new case. I'll try to get away as quick as I can.'

The traffic was heavy. Julian drove with the window down, elbow resting on the sill.

‘Ev-er-y-one is fucking off out of the city for the weekend,' he hummed. The music
was down low. His face was tired and cheerful. He was concentrating.

Audrey wondered if they were friends. She'd thought the highway would follow the
coast, but they were travelling inland, and it was all green through the windows.
Once in a while Julian would say
This is the Hawkesbury
or point out a turn-off.
She couldn't work out how far away they were from the sea.

The bike was in the front yard of the guy's house. It was more slender than Audrey
had expected. She'd imagined something ostentatious.

Julian stood with his arms crossed asking questions, looking it over. Audrey didn't
know if he was bluffing or if he actually knew things about motorcycles and their
mechanics. The seller was a guy in his fifties, Audrey guessed, full in the face,
easy smile, broad chest. She toed the pebbles edging the dry grass, half-listening
to their conversation. Julian went to test it. She stayed behind in the yard, made
small talk with the owner, drank the glass of ginger beer he offered her, scratched
his dog's belly.