Our Magic Hour (25 page)

At last he got up and set the kettle boiling. He went to the cupboard.

‘Don't tell me you've got food in there,' Audrey said, and Bern affected a housewifely
pose, biscuits in hand, one leg bent upward at the knee, eyelashes fluttering.

‘Iced VoVo?'

Audrey laughed. ‘Listen, do you mind if I have a look at your art?'

Bernie dropped his head.

‘I didn't mean to put you on the spot. You don't have to show me.'

‘No, it's not that,' he said. ‘They're just…nothing special.'

She followed him into his bedroom, whose walls were lined with canvases: their family
in oils. Audrey was stunned.

‘I don't really know what I'll do with them yet,' Bern said. ‘Only one painting's
going on display at the Ian Potter, and that's not until April or something.'

‘They're amazing, Bern.'

He blushed. ‘I was getting quite prolific there for a while.'

Sylvie occupied three rectangular canvases. She stared vacantly, cigarette in hand;
she leaned back in her chair; she was savage-eyed, hands swiping the air. Audrey
recognised her own face with a shock. Her image smiled hesitantly, as though she'd
just looked up.

‘I was trying to get that whole Princess Di thing you do,' Bern grinned, giving her
a nudge. ‘Oh, little
me
, I'm so
demure
.'

‘Fuck off. We can't all be Nick Cave.'

She couldn't meet her own eyes. It was her likeness, but it was not familiar. She
was used to the bump in her nose, the lines of her body, but something in her welled
up in protest. She tilted her head at the canvas.

‘It is weird,' Bernie said. He cleared his throat. ‘It has to be weird to see yourself,
or a…representation of yourself, like that.'

Audrey looked at him. ‘I guess it is.'

‘One afternoon I was having a really bad time of it, and Hazel came over for a smoke.
I should've known, because I don't like weed. But I had this complete dissociative
thing, where I couldn't see myself in the mirror. I felt like I wasn't my body.'

‘Bong on,' Audrey said. She instantly wished she hadn't made a joke of it. She wanted
to tell him about that night at the Brunswick Green when she'd looked at her reflection
in the bathroom cubicle and hadn't recognised herself, or the time she'd been driving
and had sensed a divergence, sure the petrol tanker had collected her car, certain
she was dead.

She turned from the painting. ‘Is it weird sleeping in here, with all of them?'

‘It's sort of nice,' Bern said. ‘They're keeping me company.'

The final canvas depicted their father reclining on a sofa chair. Audrey recalled
the image from an old photo taken several Christmases ago. Bern had made him disarming.
He looked like a simple man, a minor character from a play. ‘That was the one that
NGV wanted to exhibit,' said Bern, ‘but I asked if they'd show the family portrait
instead.'

‘Where's that?'

‘Painting room. They've taken over the house.'

Audrey followed him. The largest canvas occupied almost an entire wall. Sylvie the
matriarch sat squarely. Her face was regal and serene: only the cigarette between
her fingers hinted at anxiety. Beside her sat Irène, whose hard face was relaxed
into a smile. In the back, Audrey and Bernard. Bern with a sheepish grin, leaning
on Sylvie's chair. Audrey laughing openly, unexpectedly. They were a family.

‘I've never seen anything better than this,' Audrey said. She couldn't stop staring.

He was bashful. ‘I'll go and finish the tea. You can look around, if you want.'

She went over to the desk by the window and opened one of his black folios. The entire
process was detailed, from its inception to the final toilsome stages. Digital photographs
of the paintings at various stages in the process had been pasted in, altered, painted
over, annotated. Bern's handwriting spilled over the pages.

How invasive it seemed, Audrey thought, how clinical, that this had been inspected
and marked. She flipped through more pages. Photos of her: a few with Nick, some
miscellaneous family shots, a few ballpoint pen sketches of her own face.

She closed the folio and retreated to the kitchen.

‘You're pretty clever, Bern.'

‘It's just art.' He turned from the sink and handed her a mug. ‘Don't get excited.'

It was a long way back out to Tyabb without a car. Audrey hadn't done it since school:
she couldn't believe how far she'd commuted those months before she'd left home.
Train to the end of the line, then the sporadic bus, then the phone call to come
and pick her up.
Sylvie had huffed—
The schools are all the same, you will meet the
same friends at school here, it's ridiculous, this travelling,
hein
, you sleep in
your friend's house more than at home
—but when her father picked her up he was kind.
Those were Audrey's gentlest memories of him. It was winter when they moved out there.
It was usually dark by the time she called. She'd wait for the car in well-lit spaces,
under shop awnings or in phone booths. She pulled the sleeves of her rugby jumper
over her hands, hopped from foot to foot. She only felt safe when the slowing headlights
belonged to her parents' decaying Holden Commodore. When it was her father behind
the wheel he'd lean in for a kiss (shocked, every time, by her cold cheeks) and blow
a hot breath in her ear. Sometimes he'd stop at the servo and buy her a bottle of
orange juice or a bag of chips. He respected her stubbornness, her tenacity, in making
that stupid trip.

She caught a cab home. Sylvie was there, skirt and flesh-coloured stockings and the
bank's garish black-and-yellow shirt, watching the evening news with the captions
on.

Audrey sat on the arm of the couch.

‘How was work?' she asked.

Sylvie pushed her lips out and made a little
putt
sound. ‘Just the same. What did
you do today?'

‘I rode to Balnarring and went for a swim first thing this morning. I must have just
missed you. Then I went to Bernie's. I saw his art.'

‘If he spend as much time on
his schoolwork as he spend painting,' Sylvie said. Audrey waited for the end of the
sentence but it didn't come.

‘I don't think it matters about his score,' she said. ‘The course he wants to do,
they don't care what he got for accounting. It's about his art.'

‘You always defend him.'

‘He's smart in the ways that matter,' Audrey said.

‘On verra.'
Sylvie fiddled with her earring, trying to unscrew the
back. The tiny
pin fell away, and she swore. Both women dropped to their hands and knees, looking
for the piece of metal. Audrey pinched it between her fingers.
‘Tiens.'
They faced
each other, sitting on the rug.

‘How were you swimming?' Sylvie asked.

‘What?'

‘You said you went to swim this morning.' Sylvie sounded suspicious. It was such
a funny thing to mistrust that Audrey had to suppress a grin.

‘Yeah, at Balnarring. In Sydney my house is close to the sea baths, almost across
the road. I've been trying to swim every day.'

Sylvie sat back on her heels. ‘How did you learn?'

‘Nick taught me. Ages ago.'

‘It's a good thing to know,' Sylvie said. ‘I wish I learned.' She had lipstick on
her front tooth. Audrey felt a pinprick of sorrow.

‘I could teach you,' she said. ‘I'm not very good. But we could try.'

‘I'm too old now.'

‘Fifty-three isn't old. You can learn.'

‘I'm embarrassed,' Sylvie said.

‘We can go early in the morning before anyone's there,' Audrey said. ‘Only if you
want to, though. I don't want to fight you about it.'

‘I want to,' she said. ‘But not in the sea.'

‘Okay. We'll find a pool.'

Sylvie turned the earring over in her fingers. In a second she'd get up and find
her cigarettes.
We can do it
, Audrey wanted to say.

Adam phoned. The outdoor cinema was showing
Mulholland Drive
. They had a few beers
in the courtyard of the Standard, then walked over to the old convent. Adam stopped
to piss in an alley near the train station and Audrey hissed
Shush, can't you do
it quieter? The whole
of Collingwood can hear you taking a slash
, and he hollered
Do you hear the people sing, singing the songs of angry men
, and Audrey started to
laugh helplessly. They marched over to St Heliers Street arm in arm, picked their
way to a pair of seats, clinked their bottles of cider together.

‘I saw Bern yesterday.'

‘How's he doing? When does he find out about uni?'

‘Not till January. I think he's put VCA down first.' Audrey dug at the label on the
bottle with her thumbnail, tried to peel it off cleanly. ‘I saw his paintings. They
were unbelievable. I was a bit thrown.'

Adam glanced at her. ‘How so?'

‘I don't know. He's just always been the baby, this artsy little shit, you know,
making zines and taking photos. But he's actually
good
.' The sky was darkening. She
watched two bats arc from one tree to another. ‘He just seems so old and so together
since I went to Sydney. But it hasn't been that long.'

‘Maybe I should buy up now,' Adam said, ‘if he's going to be the next Brett Whiteley.'

It was still warm when the film finished. They walked over to the grounds so Adam
could have a cigarette. From the top of the hill the city seemed close. Audrey looked
at the patterns the old factory chimneys made. She paced back and forth, walking
the line where the paved area finished and the garden began. There was a small sign
warning of snakes in summertime.

‘You know that scene with the opera singer, where she falls over and you realise
it's been a tape all along?' Adam said. ‘It just terrifies me. I always sit there
waiting for something awful to happen. There's something really sinister about it.'

‘I know what you mean. It's sort of—emotionally gruesome.'

Adam nodded, grimaced. The breeze blew light and hot, but Audrey saw him shiver.
She thought of Nick.

Audrey chose an indoor pool in Hastings. They went on a weekday evening, parked in
the lot between the recreation centre and the foreshore. The day had been overcast.
The floodlights were already on. It was a bleak foreshore, gentle and grey, no waves.
The boats barely moved. Sylvie looked out at the jetty through the windscreen. Her
mouth was set.

Audrey worried she'd pushed her into it. ‘We don't have to do this,' she said.

‘I want you to teach me.'

‘Okay.'

The air inside the complex was warm and chemical. In the change rooms Sylvie sat
on the bench, towel around her like a shock blanket, while Audrey shrugged out of
her shirt and jeans.

‘I brought you some goggles,' she said.

‘I need to put them—?'

‘You don't have to put them.' Slipping into Sylvie's speech patterns. ‘You don't
have to put your head under at all. It's up to you.'

The pool was almost empty. The swimmers at the far end made it look like calm work,
stroking in the roped-off lanes. The water fell away from their bodies cleanly.

The water was chest-high at the shallow end. Sylvie lowered herself to her chin.
She kept her mouth above the water. Audrey watched her testing it out.

‘Come and hold on to the edge,' she said. They stood side by side. Their knuckles
made a mountain range. ‘Take a big breath, and blow some bubbles. You don't have
to go right under. Just like this.'

‘Like a crocodile,' Sylvie said. She didn't smile. She took a lungful of air, put
her mouth to the water and exhaled.

‘Good—you're doing good. You can put your nose in. Nothing bad will happen. The water
won't go up.'

She made Sylvie kick her legs out behind her, still holding on to the edge. ‘Just
be calm. You don't need to kick that hard. You don't want a big splash.' Her mother's
body was tense and determined.

‘Do you want to try floating?' Sylvie wiped her nose with her wrist. ‘Come on, it's
good. I'll be next to you. You can stand up here, anyway.' She flailed to right herself
the first few times her feet left the pool floor. Audrey kept saying
Relax, just
try to relax
, even though she knew it was impossible: she remembered the terrifying
feeling of imbalance. She put a hand under the small of Sylvie's back, another hand
under her skull.

Sylvie smiled up at Audrey, suspended and weightless.

‘It's good, isn't it?' Audrey said. ‘You're doing a good job. Can I let go? You'll
be okay by yourself—' She took her hands away very carefully, one at a time. Sylvie
floated by herself for a moment. Then she turned her head and water rushed in at
her mouth and nose, and she panicked. Audrey grabbed her under the arms.