Our Magic Hour (9 page)

‘Hey,' she said in his ear. ‘What are you doing?'

‘Can we talk?' His voice was shivery.

‘What?'

‘I said, can we talk? I'm freaking out.'

‘Are you okay?' Audrey asked. She looked at his pupils. ‘Have you taken something?'

‘Jordy gave me something to keep me going.'

‘What the fuck?'

‘I feel heaps better. Can we just talk for a second?' he said again.

Audrey followed him down the back of the house to the laundry.

‘I've been feeling really bad about Katy,' said Nick. ‘I just keep thinking there
must've been something we could have done. We must've missed something.'

Audrey leaned against the washing machine. The room was quiet and cold. She felt
the blood run faster through her body. ‘I can't talk to you about this tonight, Nick.'

‘What if we just don't listen to one another? Maybe she tried to give us hints. I
keep thinking about the night before, when everyone was round at our place. We must
have missed something. I feel horrible.'

‘It's the speed.'

‘It's fucking not.' Mad eyes. Audrey was scared to touch him. ‘I can't stop thinking
about it, all the time. Things keep happening so quickly, and we never stop to process
any of it. Your mum's always threatening suicide. We just ignore her.'

‘You don't know her like I do. She's been threatening it since I was nine.'

‘We don't listen to one another,' Nick said again, voice rising. ‘You're not listening
now.' He was hysterical, arms flung out.

Audrey gave a short laugh. ‘Are we having an argument?' she asked.

Nick drew back, and then his fist was in the wall. White shreds and dust fell to
the ground like salt as pulled out his hand. He stared at it; cradled it with his
other. There was a rough hole in the plaster.

Audrey looked at the wall. That old familiar feeling was in her arms. Enervation,
adrenaline: too much of one of them. When she and Irène were children they'd called
it the floppy arms before they stopped talking about it.

She stood very still.

Patrick appeared at the door. ‘Everything okay?' He saw the jagged hole. ‘Fuck, mate,'
he said. He looked from the plaster to Nick to Audrey, pressed right into the corner
of the room.

Nick stared goggle-eyed at the wall.
You fucking idiot
, Audrey wanted to say, but
even her mouth was weak. She left him standing there with Patrick.

She went to the kitchen and got another drink. Adam came looking for her.

‘Ben just told me what happened,' he said. ‘You okay?'

‘Yes.'

‘Did he—'

‘He did a line of speed and put his fist through a wall.' She saw something flicker
across Adam's face. She remembered that expression, the one she hadn't seen for
years, the one Katy made when she saw Audrey's bruises at the swimming pool when
they were fourteen. Now Adam was ready to make pitying noises in his throat. ‘I'm
fine,' she said. ‘I'm just going to go outside for a bit.'

‘Do you want me to come?'

‘Would you mind if I just—if I were just by myself?'

She finished her wine in the backyard. She was watery in the legs. She watched a
possum run along the fence and disappear into the lantana below. Nick came and stood
beside her. She couldn't look at him. She watched the black shapes of the garden
moving in the night.

‘I don't know why I did that,' he said.

Audrey dropped her head. ‘No.'

‘I was just so tired, and it's making me loopy. But that's not an excuse.'

Audrey folded her arms and turned to him. ‘My dad did that once, when he missed Maman's
face. There is no excuse.'

‘I'm so sorry,' Nick said. He was ashen, a cartoon of a man pleading. He knew her
well enough to feel the weight of his mistake. ‘I've never done that before,' he
said. ‘It's not me. I don't know what happened. I'm sorry.'

Audrey didn't want to go back inside to the party or stand out here with him, but
there were no other choices. She didn't want him to keep apologising.

‘It's okay. Let's just go.'

He said
Sorry
again as they arrived home, and Audrey said
It's okay
again.

Inside she washed the dishes they'd left in the sink.

‘I'd never do what your dad did,' Nick said, standing behind her.

‘I know that.'

He touched her arm. She started. The glasses skittered on the drying rack. Nick took
a step back, bewildered.

‘I can't help it,' Audrey said. ‘I can't help it.' She couldn't believe how quickly
it had happened, this new pain. She was twenty-four; it was seven years since her
father had last hit her. Nick had only ever known her with a crooked nose, a break
that had happened in the Wellington Street flats and never quite healed straight.
Stringy blood in her throat and her eyes, but when she'd got in front of the mirror
it was all coming from her nose and it wasn't as bad as she'd thought. Sylvie had
wiped the snot and blood from her cheeks with a warm washcloth. Audrey was fifteen.

Nick knew the story. Audrey told him everything eventually.

In bed they took turns being still.

‘How are you feeling?' Audrey said.

‘Better than before. I just can't drop off. My body's so tired, but my head isn't.'
He clutched the quilt to his chest. ‘I shouldn't have
come tonight. I should've stayed
home and crashed.'

‘How much did you do?'

‘I don't know. Not that much. I just freaked out.' He rolled over, face to the ceiling.
‘It's gone now. I can't feel it any more.'

The next time she glanced over he was asleep. His scratched, swollen hand lay on
the pillow. It was purple. His middle knuckle seemed to have disappeared. It looked
sick, not sinister.

Audrey remembered the scene in
A Clockwork Orange
when Alex's eyes are held open
with metal claws. She thought about hair. Someone had told her it keeps growing even
after you die. She thought about her infancy, herself and Irène as children. With
their mother they were
mes filles
or
mes p'tites
. When Neil was home, they were
the
girls
once more. They slipped in and out of their selves like hands in and out of
pockets. At work now she knew the word for it:
hypervigilant
, she'd say, meaning
children who slept with one eye open, little hardened invertebrates.

They'd kept a sickly rabbit when they were living in the New Street flats. It was
allowed to hop around the apartment; it knew to shit in its box. Audrey and Irène
poked bits of lettuce and broccoli into its anxious pink mouth, but Neil loved it
most. It sat on his lap like a cat while he read. When he was a good drunk, mawkish
and weepy, he'd stroke the rabbit's ears and bellow about man and nature, and the
creature would cower on his knees. Audrey was twelve. She read in a library book
that rabbits could die of fright. ‘Winter gardens,' Neil would drone, ‘were all part
of that, showing man's dominance over nature, the triumph of the artificial over
the
real wild
.' Audrey watched the rabbit, clenched and petrified in her father's
lap, and imagined its heart beating furiously.

The rabbit didn't die of fright. It ate all the shredded paper in its hutch and blocked
its insides. Neil buried it in the yard, out near the gaping drains. A neighbour
came out to protest with a mug of tea in her hand. ‘It's the state's land,' she said.
‘You can't bury a fucken
bunny there.' Neil leaned on the shovel for a moment, cigarette
dangling from his lip, but said nothing. He was gentle with the rabbit. Its fur rippled
in the wind. Audrey had watched from a distance.

She slid her feet between Nick's thighs. She thought of his wounded expression in
the kitchen. He'd looked destroyed at the idea that he could frighten her. She heard
the first train rattle towards the city.

It was still dark when he turned on the heating in the morning. Water streamed down
the drainpipes. The gutters flooded. Audrey got up with a mind to go to the laundrette.
She took two armfuls of washing out to the car, and came back inside dripping.

‘It's really raining,' she said. ‘The gully trap's overflowed.'

‘Do you want me to come with you?'

‘It's all right. I'll get the papers.' They stood on either side of the kitchen bench.
Audrey put her hand on the coffee plunger and very slowly pressed down its head.

The laundrette was cold. Audrey sat on the wooden bench and shuffled her feet over
the linoleum, made her instep line up with the diagonals of the diamonds. Last night
Nick had said
You're not twelve now, Spence
. He'd said it to reassure her. She wanted
to say, meanly,
How astute of you. Thanks for making the distinction
, but making
Nick feel bad would have punished her, too. When she'd left the house he was on the
phone to Emy already, still apologising.

Katy was the first person Audrey ever told about her dad. Adam next. They were young,
thirteen or fourteen. They sat out on the windy oval, or huddled in the bike shed.
Katy jumped hurdles, Adam captained the football team and then the school, Audrey
always had runs in her tights. In Year 11 she read Raymond Carver for school, in
Year 12 it was Toni Morrison. Katy made herself vomit every lunchtime for a year;
she could do it quietly and efficiently.
Audrey would wait for her outside the stall.
Once Katy said
I know I haven't got it anything like as bad as you
, and Audrey had
shrugged, said
It's not a competition
. In the worst times Katy had vomited into a
plastic container to assess the weight of it, so she could know what she'd thrown
up. Eventually she stopped. Audrey wasn't sure if Adam ever knew.

They only ever saw the marks on Audrey's body. She couldn't make them understand
that there were good times, too. Drives to the coast, Gippsland creeks where their
parents had camped in a tent and she, Irène and Bernie had slept in the back of the
station wagon, curled like dogs, their breath fogging the windows. The week before
Christmas when they'd choose the tree. Her mother always wanted to get a small one,
or a tree with a bald patch, in case no one else wanted it. Weekday mornings, her
father grating carrots and potatoes for hash browns the size of the frypan. Sometimes
her parents were so in love it was like a f ilm. Sylvie was bright, an electric woman.
She danced to ‘Tusk' while she cooked dinner, showed the girls how to apply makeup
in front of the speckled bathroom mirror, let Bernie wear her costume jewellery.
Neil was charming. He liked taking photos. They had a lot of pictures of happy times.
Katy and Adam never got to see them. Once they were smoking in Adam's backyard at
night and Katy asked
Does your dad ever do—anything else
? and Audrey had been high
and terrified but even then she knew it must have taken Katy some guts to ask it.
She'd shaken her head over and over.
No. No. No. He's not a bad person. My parents
are not bad people.

The washing machine finished. Audrey heaved the wet sheets back into the plastic
basket. She thought of Bernie pissing his bed, aged six or seven. She'd hurried to
bundle the linen into the machine before their parents noticed, then to bundle her
brother into her own bed. She thought of how much force it took to open up a wall
with your fist.

Dinner at Irène's house that night. Nick said he'd drive. Audrey almost argued with
him, but he was in a good mood. He'd fixed the skylight, stopped it leaking. He kissed
her eyelids closed as if he were putting her to sleep. She let him.

They looked at each other reluctantly as they got into the car.

‘We don't have to go,' Nick said. He adjusted the rear-view mirror. ‘I'll call Irène
and tell her you've got gastro.'

‘No, because Bernie'll probably bail too.'

Everything was black and gold. The rain fell like snow under the streetlamps. Audrey
wished she were driving instead of Nick so she'd be distracted. She watched the smeary
droplets on the windscreen. The car inched onto the freeway. The rainbow sign above
the factories read OUR MAGIC HOUR.

Audrey felt sick.

Nick was concentrating hard, but he turned to her when they stopped.

‘You look a bit better.'

‘I'm fine.' She started counting lampposts. It was what her mother had told her to
do when she was young, when she used to get carsick. The rain had flooded the underpass.
She couldn't ask him to pull over. The traffic began to move and she felt better.

‘Are you still mad at me?' Nick asked.

‘Of course not.'

‘Well, what can I do? I can't read you when you're like this. I don't know what to
do.'

‘You don't have to
read
me.' She could barely see through the windscreen for the
rain. Nick was driving twenty kilometres below the speed limit. Audrey lost count
of the lampposts and started to sweat. She made the air go in and out. They turned
off the freeway. She looked for the streets and markers she knew. She tried to think
of things outside of this interminable car trip. The rain eased suddenly.

They pulled up in front of Irène's house. Audrey yanked the door open. Cold air rushed
into the car. Her breath came in an ugly gasp.

‘It's last night. It's my fault.'

‘It's not your fault.' Audrey rubbed her face. ‘I got a fright. Maybe I overreacted.
I'm tired. I don't know.'

He leaned over and kissed her, hard. She stroked his neck. The terror was gone, the
bile, the sweat. What remained was small and sickly. She wondered if he could taste
it in her.