Our Magic Hour (3 page)

Audrey turned to the sink and rinsed her mug.

‘I'd better go. I'll see ya,' Hazel said.

‘C'est ça? Tu t'en vas?'
Bernie asked.

‘I don't understand,' Hazel laughed. ‘I'll see you tomorrow night.'

‘See you, Hazel. Nice to meet you,' Audrey said.

‘Yeah, you too,' the girl said, and left, her light hair hanging down her back.

Bernie and Audrey listened for the door to open and close.

‘God, you're a shit,' Audrey said, following him into his bedroom. His mattress was
an island in the middle of the floor, sheets and blankets puckered. Beside it, an
overflowing ceramic ashtray from the Big Pineapple. Damp teabags sat sourly in mugs.
Books were piled in towers around the room. Junot Díaz, Alice Munro, a book of Diane
Arbus pictures, school textbooks with weak, fat spines. The window was stripped of
curtains. An enormous Egon Schiele print was peeling off the wall.

‘You're a shit,' Audrey repeated, picking up a crumpled piece of paper and pitching
it at his head.
‘I'm a little fucked-up French boy. Come around to my flat and we
can listen to New Order together while we get high.'

‘Don't be a cunt,' Bernie said, dropping to the mattress. ‘The girls like it.'

‘Yeah,
you
like it,' Audrey said, nudging him with her toe. ‘Don't ever trick me
into lending you money again.'

‘It was just one pill.'

‘That's all it takes, idiot.'

‘T'es pas ma mère.'

‘No, I'm not, so stop acting like a child.' She picked up the ashtray. ‘Go to school
or something.'

‘Go to school!' Bernie sat up. He laughed and hung his head. ‘I'm sorry, Audie. I'm
really stoned. Hang on, isn't it Saturday?'

‘Just testing.' She touched his soft dark hair. ‘I made you some more meals. They're
in the freezer. You look skinny. And answer your phone. Maman was flipping out.'
She picked up a small yellow book from the floor: Zola's
L'Assommoir
.

‘Was this Dad's?'

‘Yeah.'

‘Can I borrow it? I haven't read it in ages.'

‘Yeah.'

She put the book in her bag, carried the ashtray to the kitchen and dumped the cigarette
butts into the bin.

‘Thanks,' Bernie called from his room.

The music came back on, louder than before.

Audrey drove to Adam's. She parked beneath a spindly eucalypt and climbed the concrete
stairs with one hand on the banister. She heard music pouring out from the apartment.
The security screen trembled with the noise. Adam opened the door wearing nothing
but a pair of briefs.

‘You told me you gave up wearing those last year,' Audrey shouted over the music.

‘I like my tighty-whities,' Adam said, ‘and if I want to wear them—'

Audrey shut the door behind her. She turned down the speakers. ‘Been practising your
killer moves?'

Adam shrugged. ‘This morning I got up and went for a run, boiled an egg, had a shower,
put on some Pulp. I just feel really good.'

‘Dancing in your undies.'

‘Yeah. I thought I'd go out tonight, too. She wouldn't want me sitting around. That's
what everyone says. You know, keep busy.'
He was running a hand through his hair
over and over as he spoke. Audrey's eyes flickered to his pupils. ‘I read on the
internet about carbon-monoxide poisoning,' he went on. ‘It's a peaceful way to go.
I think that's important. It's just like going to sleep. You don't feel your central
nervous system start to collapse. You don't know, but your blood's toxic.'

‘God, Adam,' Audrey said, ‘you don't need to read that.'

He crumpled to the floor. She crouched beside him.

‘Who found her?' he said. ‘She wouldn't have even looked the same.'

Audrey pictured Katy's face, discoloured and horrific. She sat down hard. Adam was
sobbing. ‘This is the worst feeling. I can't fucking stand this.'

Audrey clambered to turn off the music. ‘I'll make you a coffee.' She couldn't look
at him, so pitiful in his boyish underwear. He got up and stood before her, shrivelled
and tentative, waiting for direction. ‘Put some clothes on, for God's sake,' she
said at last.

They sat at the kitchen table.

‘She hated your tighty-whities,' Audrey said.

Adam laughed thickly. ‘She made me give them up. My New Year's ressie last year.
I kept a couple pairs.' He wiped his nose. ‘She didn't hate many things, though,
did she?'

‘Just yappy dogs.'

‘Milky tea.'

‘Voyeuristic television programs.' Audrey looked down at her mug. Toxic blood.

‘Did you say you were at Bernie's before?'

‘Yeah. He had a girl over.'

‘Tell me,' Adam said.

‘I don't know what to tell. He's a deadshit. Everything's such a
battle
with him.'
Adam was holding his glasses in front of his face. There was a fingerprint smudge
on one of the lenses.

‘Come on,' Audrey said. ‘Let's go out.'

Adam shook his head. ‘I can't.'

They stood in the doorway of the apartment.

‘It'll get better, Adam.'

‘Yep.'

She touched his arm. ‘Call. If there's anything.'

Outside it was warm and raining. The bitumen was steaming. Could it still be the
same fuggy Saturday? Audrey slid the key into the ignition. She wondered if Adam
was watching her from the window, and waved in case.

He'd made her look at photos. He took out a Kodak packet from the chest of drawers,
and suddenly Katy was there. Ashy blond hair that caught the sunlight, heavy-lidded
eyes, strong shoulders. She pulled a face at the beach, next to Adam; she stood seriously
on the sand alone, looking down the camera lens with her unfashionable sunglasses;
she was vicious playing Scrabble with Audrey, Emy and Nick in her lounge room; she
paused to smile mid-conversation, holding a plastic takeaway container in one hand,
a fork in the other.

Adam was looking for a clue. There was nothing there.
I want to talk to that guy
she was seeing
, he'd said.
Jarrod. Where can we find him? I bet her parents don't
even know
. Katy was spread all over the table in little six-by-four squares. No crime
scenes; there was no detective work to be done. Audrey longed to open the kitchen
window and press her face to the fresh air.

She wanted to tell Nick about it as they walked to Smith Street for dinner, but she
couldn't explain it. Looking at pictures with Adam didn't sound so unreasonable.

The restaurant light was dim. Audrey traced her fingertip over the laminex tabletop
where her wineglass had left a ring of condensation. She thought to say
I went to
visit Bern and Adam today, and Bern
was high and Adam was something else, and neither
of them was wearing pants, and I had to shout at them both just to get in the door
.
Nick would see the funny side. He always said it was Audrey who'd shown him how to
laugh at bleak things, but she was sure she'd learned it from him.

The food arrived. Nick waited until the waitress left before he spoke. ‘I don't know
why I said my day was all right,' he said. ‘It was shit.'

‘How come?'

‘A woman in Fairfield tried to hang herself from a light fitting and it fell out
of the ceiling.' He nudged his beer bottle. ‘And an OD. We got there too late. The
father found a note.'

‘Are you all right? Does Tim know what happened?'

‘No.'

‘Do you think you should tell him?'

‘And say what?
Sorry, mate, you'll have to take care of this one on your own. I'm
just going to find myself a nice embolism. It's a bit close to home, a friend gassed
herself the other week.
' He set down his fork. ‘Sorry,' he said. ‘That was awful
and it's not your fault.'

‘It's okay.'

‘It's just work. You know.'

‘I know.'

‘I have to be able to do it.'

She looked at him across the table. ‘It's okay. I know,' she said again. Nick nodded.

They'd shared friends from the beginning. They met three times without meaning to.
First at the Gasometer, in the draughty space by the bandroom, for Yusra's birthday.
Audrey was a sleepy drunk sloping out of her chair and under Nick's arm. The second
time they escaped a party and ran out into the night. They shared a joint lying on
the dry grass of Royal Park. He told her what he knew about the
stars, about ancient
gods and wars; chaos, the nothingness from which all else sprang. He said, shyly,
My mum made me do classics in high school
. The third time was at a gig, and they
were together after that. He taught her to drive, called her Spencer because Adam
did. She waited a year to introduce him to her family. That first dinner he sat like
a clenched fist, and nothing happened. Driving home she said
You don't believe me,
do you
. He was stunned.
Of course I do
.

Remember the pneumonia
was Nick's way of trying to convince her he was right about
something. When they'd first moved into the Charles Street house together, Audrey
caught a cold that got steadily worse. For weeks she shook her head blithely at Nick,
a newly qualified paramedic, and coughed into her tissues. She finished her student
placement at QEC. When he came home one night and found her feverish and bloody at
the throat, with her jumper on inside-out, Nick bundled her into the car. She argued
with him all the way to Emergency. By the time she was in a four-bed ward with a
nasal cannula she'd already began to laugh at it. They laughed about most things,
eventually.

The phone sounded in the middle of the night. Audrey lurched sideways.

‘Hello?'

‘What do we do?' A throbbing, awful voice.

‘What? It's late, Adam. Are you all right?' Audrey sat on the floor.

‘What do we do now?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘I don't know.' He was crying again. ‘How do you know what to do? I can't
stand
this.
How are you doing it?'

Audrey scraped her fingers through her hair. Nick was awake. He switched on the bedside
lamp and rolled over to watch her.

‘You just have to keep moving,' Audrey said. ‘And try to sleep at night. It'll get
better. You have the bad days first, and then some
good ones. And then one day you'll
realise you've had all these good days in a row, maybe a hundred.'

‘How do you know?'

‘Everything's always worse in the middle of the night. Go to sleep, and then when
you wake up everything will look better.' She rubbed her eyes. ‘Are you safe? Do
you want me to come over?'

‘It's all right. Sorry I called.'

‘Don't be sorry. Just get some sleep.'

‘Okay, Spence. Okay. 'Night.'

‘'Night.'

She climbed back into bed.

‘You said the right things,' Nick said.

Audrey reached for the light. She was cold. ‘How would anybody know what to say.'
She touched his face, the plane of his cheekbone, with the flat of her hand; traced
his lips with her fingers. He looked wide awake.

It had been a fortnight. Audrey was homesick for everything that had come before.

When they got together she was twenty. It was endless silly mornings in the kitchen;
bike rides around the creek; kissing in the back of taxis, in cinemas, on street
corners. Nick made her laugh in a new way. While at university he worked as a kitchen
hand in a café in Rathdowne Village—
The Toorak of the north
, he said—and Audrey would
meet him when he finished in the afternoons. They'd walk to the park, or back to
his apartment on Blyth Street that he shared with Mark, or sit out on the pavement
with expensive European beers, him in his daggy checked chef pants, not caring. If
he was pissed off about something, it became funny in the retelling. So many afternoons
lying on his bed waiting for him to shower, to stop smelling of mint and garlic and
mushroom, or sitting on the cold tiles, talking to him while he squirted shampoo
onto his head. He
had a pleasant voice when he sang, or maybe she was just used to
it. One Labour Day he invited her up to the Murray with his family. When he found
out she couldn't swim he spent hours at the Northcote pool, teaching her to turn
her head to the side and suck in air every four strokes, to cup the water and draw
it towards her, to think of her feet like flippers. A half-roll of film, left over
from a disposable camera he'd taken to a music festival, he used up on her, on the
ordinary. Audrey tying back her hair, Audrey in the kitchen with a book and a beer.
The two of them kissing, the tops of their heads obscured by the camera's f lash
in the mirror above the bathroom sink. When Audrey laughed and said
Why don't you
go out and take pictures of your friends
, he said
I don't want pictures of them.
In the mornings when she had to get up and go to work or class, he watched her dress.

‘What are you doing? Come and lie in bed with me.'

‘I already slept there,' Audrey said. He looked up at her through boy lashes. ‘I'm
going to be late. I've already gone. What's the past tense of bye?' But she lay down
beside him, looked at the rooftops out the window, the flats, the trees with their
timid branches. It was the first time someone had said
Please stay
.

It was getting so the warmth dropped out of the days quicker, and the sun was thin.
Audrey supervised an access visit between a mother and her fifteen-month-old boy
in a playground. The baby walked around unsteadily. Every few minutes he'd find something
on the ground, or start to run away, and Audrey would get up to chase after him.