Our Magic Hour (20 page)

On Friday afternoon she walked to the station with one of the other workers. They
passed the university, the grim strip of shops, the sign in the window of the Westmead
Tavern that said LUCKY LOUNGE, making small talk.

‘You must be buggered,' the woman said. ‘Anytime you start a new job it's like that.
Trying to suss out who's who in the zoo, take
it all in as fast as you can, not muck
up. You'll be right.'

Audrey felt a flash of gratitude for her. She couldn't think of her name when they
said goodbye. They waved at each other from different platforms.

Claire went out with a friend and Audrey offered to look after Elliott.

‘Let's go down to the sea,' he said. They buttoned their jackets and caught the bus
to the beach, where they took off their shoes and waded in the cold water. Elliott
collected shells and bits of glass in a leather purse that had once belonged to Claire.
His face was set in a determined grimace against the wind. Eventually he relaxed
and told stories and joked with her. Audrey was glad for the company.

After a while Elliott wandered further up the beach. Audrey sat on the sand and took
out her book. When he came back he was grinning.

‘Do you know,' he said, sitting down beside her, ‘there's a man up there having a
wank.' Something split inside Audrey and laughter came flying out.

‘If I say
You're very suave
,' she said, ‘do you know what that means?'

‘Nup.'

‘Sophisticated. Cool.'

‘Charming?'

‘Yeah, charming, too.'

Elliott inched his small bum closer to hers. ‘I'm going to tell Claire she's suave.'
He fiddled with the frayed strap on his purse. ‘I always want to live with Claire,'
he said. ‘I'm going to live with her forever.' His long lashes flickered in earnest.
Audrey smiled at his devotion.

It was late afternoon by the time they caught the bus home again. The wind was cold
and dry. Elliott examined his bag full of sand
and shells. Audrey watched the grey
sky through the window.

‘Hey Audrey?'

‘Yes?'

‘Is your mum beautiful like Claire?'

‘She's different to Claire.'

Elliott thought about it. ‘Claire's the kind of beautiful that if she does a handstand
and her legs go in the air and everyone sees her undies no one cares.'

‘You're probably right.'

They made it home. Elliott sang all the way. He hurled his body around the footpath
as he sang, giddy. He liked to test Audrey.
Do you know where that train's going?
Do you know when Claire's coming home? Do you know—
as they crossed the park on Louis
Street with its brick-wall mural of the Aboriginal flag—
what that painting means?

Claire came back at teatime with a tall man whose head was bent into the collar of
his jacket. His hair was covering his eyes and he looked surly, but he softened when
he saw Elliott.

‘Hello, mate.'

‘
Hola
, Julian. Hi, Claire.'

‘Hey, Rambo. What'd you do today?'

‘Went to the beach.'

‘The beach?' shrieked Claire. ‘But it's fucken c-o-o-o-ld!' The three of them pushed
into the warm kitchen, where Audrey was making soup. Claire introduced everyone with
flapping hands and a smile that showed her teeth.

‘Audrey, this is Julian. He's Elliott's dad. Julian, Audrey. She's up from Melbourne.'
They waved. Claire leaned over the stovetop. ‘That smells good.'

‘How can you be hungry after lunch?' Julian asked.

‘It always smells good when you don't have to cook it yourself.' Their conversation
ricocheted sentence for sentence. Audrey felt a twinge of longing.

Julian hoisted himself onto the bench and poured a glass of wine.

‘So how long are you in Sydney for?' he asked.

‘I've taken a job here,' Audrey said. ‘I'm just staying with Claire until I find
a place.'

‘You're kidding.' He faced Claire, incredulous. ‘Thanks for telling me, you peanut.
You know we've been looking for someone to take Sam's room.'

‘I wasn't thinking.' She and Elliott were engaged in a complicated handshake. Julian
watched them while he talked to Audrey: he would not meet her eye. She turned away
and began to slice the bread, speaking to him over her shoulder, to make things even.

She went to see his place the next weekend. It was bigger than any house she'd lived
in, set on a corner. In Coogee all the houses had names like Rosedale and Beach-Lynn
and Rosaleen Flats. The streets slanted down to the sea.

Julian answered the door. He was barefoot, less churlish than he'd seemed the other
day. He left Audrey in the kitchen while he went to get the others.
This is Pip,
and this is Frank
. They made cheerful conversation, asked her what she did, handed
her a cup of tea. ‘Oh, you've been living with Claire! The best girl!'—to Julian—‘She
must be a good egg, if she's staying with Clairy.' Pip looked right into her face.
Audrey smiled. She felt as if she were auditioning.

Julian walked her through the rooms.

‘This'd be yours,' he said. ‘It's a bit smaller than the others, but it's cheaper
and there's good light.' He laughed at himself, a sudden, gunfire sound. Audrey started.
‘Am I doing a good job? I feel like a car salesman.'

The room overlooked the backyard. It was paved in concrete, filled with wild green.
Audrey could hear the hum and hiss of the powerline. A knobbly frangipani tree stood
beneath it.

She followed him down the hall. He was talking about the block
of land being worth
heaps, how none of them knew how it was still being leased except that it was an
old house, something about fibro-cement.

‘What do you reckon?' he said at last.

‘It's a great place. I love that room. But it's a long way to work,' she said.

‘Where's that?'

‘Westmead.'

‘Yeah, it would be. Hang on, come in here a sec.'

They were in the front bedroom, his, with its window over the ocean. It was impossibly
beautiful. The open water made her think of Nick in the surf down at Fairhaven.
I'm
pretty rubbish at it. It just feels really good
.

‘Do you like swimming? There's the baths just across there, if you're into that.'

The white August light poured in. ‘Anyway,' Julian said, ‘have a think.'

Audrey got hot walking back to the bus stop. She peeled off her jumper while she
waited in the sun, and immediately felt the sweat chill her shoulders. She'd never
lived with strangers. When she first moved out of home she was still in school. It
was an emergency, it was her father with his fist and a glass-topped table and a
cut that needed stitches. She stayed with Katy's family for a while in the house
on the hill. Then she lived in Preston, in a bungalow at the back of a house owned
by one of her teachers. She paid rent out of the money she earned working at a newsagency
after school, but it was charity: fifty dollars handed over in a white envelope each
week, and both parties felt as if they'd wronged the other. Mr MacPherson's wife
taught cello, and Audrey used to listen to the gentle sawing from her window while
she did her homework. Mr MacPherson drove her to school every day with his kids in
the back seat. Sometimes she took them to the playground on Jessie Street in the
afternoons. They accepted her presence happily and without pity, and they ran around
until the air was cold and it was time to go home. Mr MacPherson's wife always asked
if Audrey wanted to eat with them. Audrey always said no, politely.

She lived by herself in Flemington for a while when she started university. The landlady
kept trying to sell her pills. The hot-water system broke in June and took three
weeks to be repaired. The couple next door shrieked and swore. Audrey felt very far
away from everyone. The year that Adam went travelling, Audrey and Katy moved in
together. They tried cooking complicated meals and watched entire television series
and slept in each other's beds most of the time. At that time Katy was still obsessed
with changing her body. There was an athletics track near their apartment and early
in the wintry mornings they walked around it, Katy in her expensive leggings and
runners, Audrey mostly in her f lannelette pyjama pants, their breath making clouds
in front of them. They must have walked thousands of circles on the rubbery red turf.

And then she moved into Charles Street with Nick. They walked to the Abbotsford Convent;
they walked around the river, and down along the tourist drives in Yarra Bend Park,
sometimes as far as the Thomas Embling Hospital. Audrey loved the way the rows of
houses and warehouses and breweries dropped away into green at the end of those streets.
You could imagine you were in the country. Their little house, where everything had
happened in the bedroom and the kitchen, and a car out front meant someone was home.

In the afternoon she lay on her single bed. Maybe it would be good to have other
people around. She thought of the sea, the hilly streets, the grand houses. She wanted
to make herself new.

Elliott was singing in a soft, high-pitched stream in the other room.

She moved into the house on Neptune Street. Julian came to pick her up and
loaded her things into his station wagon. He kept saying
Is this
it
?
as though there
ought to be more bags, more possessions. ‘Do you need anything from Ikea? We're over
this side of town.' Audrey said
Thank you
so many times he laughed at her. It was
sunny, blustery. He drove with his music very loud and his windows down so that people
turned at traffic lights. He spoke quickly, then not at all. He reversed into the
driveway recklessly, stood at the front door, hollered for the others to come and
help cart everything inside, even as Audrey said
It's okay, it's okay, I can do it
.

She sat cross-legged on the bed and assembled her clothes racks, one, two, and a
bedside table. She worked quickly, instructions spread before her.

She could hear the others downstairs, but she didn't want to intrude. They seemed
so at ease together. She laid her quilt across the bed and tried to stop the flow
of adolescent insecurities. She was eight, an ugly child, always watching. She was
twenty-five, and just as timid.

But they were kind people. There was always someone to talk to. The kitchen was never
empty.

She went to the beach every night. Sometimes she walked all the way to the clifftops
around Gordons Bay. She struggled over the soft sand. She wanted to make herself
a new hard body.

Occasionally somebody accompanied her. Pip regaled her with stories, and Audrey could
be attentive and passive beside her. Julian was good company: he and Audrey could
chat or fall to pleasant silence. Frank was a gentle gossip. When he and Audrey ran
out of things to talk about, they would sing in tuneless companionship, bodies bent
forwards.

Mostly she walked by herself. At night the streets smelled sordid, all aviation fuel
and overripe fruit and the ocean.

She visited Claire at the flower shop in Balmain. She was working on an order
for a wedding, masses of peonies and gardenias. She gave Audrey a handful of the
white blooms, wrapped in wet tissue, for her room. She disappeared into the back
of the shop, and returned in a clean shirt dress and pair of heels: Audrey went
Woo-woo
when she saw them. Claire lifted her apron over her head and said
Do you want to
come with me to deliver these?
Audrey had nothing else to do, and the two of them
drove across the harbour in the van full of flowers.
This is a rich-person suburb
,
Claire said. She'd kicked off her shoes to drive. She was talking about Elliott,
a house in Katoomba, coal power stations, her parents, the possum in her roof. Her
conversation moved strangely; she latched on to things Audrey said in reply or in
passing, and refracted them.

‘When Julian and I split up, and I moved out with El, blokes kept coming on to me,'
she said. ‘It felt as though they hadn't in years, and then all of a sudden—it was
as if they
knew
. Like I was releasing some sort of sadness chemical.'

Audrey tried to imagine how loneliness pheromones might smell, but the air in the
van was sweet. The gardenias in her lap were electric white.

The guilt crept in at night when she stopped moving. She and Nick waiting at the
laundromat, trying very hard not to laugh when a man forgot to put his washing in
the machine before he started it—‘Oh, shit, oh shit,' he'd muttered, staggering to
and fro. Audrey had thought she would explode, biting back hysterical laughter. Nick
did the impersonations for months afterwards when something went awry, hunching and
fretting,
Oh shit, oh, oh shit
.

She hoped Nick wasn't lonely. He was still the person she wanted to call most. At
night she took the blame cowering under the bedsheets.

She wrote letters home, to her mother, to her brother and sister, to Adam. Adam's
letters and phone calls were cautious. He was infatuated with Minh, but quiet about
it.
I'm all right
, Audrey wanted to say, because she knew he worried.
I'm happy you're
happy
. He was being careful not to upset her, but the censorship of his new grand
love was worse. Audrey missed his honesty.

She went to a film. She could have asked someone else to go with her—Claire would
have said yes without hesitation, maybe brought Elliott if there was no one to mind
him. Julian probably would have liked the film she'd chosen. But she straddled her
bicycle and realised the purpose of seeing the movie was to pass time: she couldn't
bear to do nothing. She rode to the theatre. When the film finished she didn't want
to go home, but it was late and she had nowhere to go, so she pedalled back to the
house where everyone was asleep. The night was airless, different to the damp Melbourne
cold. She flicked on the blow heater and stripped down to her singlet and tights.