Our Magic Hour by Jennifer Down

Author:Jennifer Down
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2016-01-18T05:00:00+00:00

Badlands

In Sydney the light was strong. Audrey’s shadow was more certain. In the days before her job began, she walked the streets as a tourist. She sent postcards home with pictures of the glittering harbour. In Glebe she found a book of Marjorie Barnard’s short stories. It had been raining and the sky was greenish. Audrey paced back and forth in front of the bus stop and looked down the streets that sloped to the city. The glass of the tall buildings turned gold and winked, then the windows became hundreds of lit squares, and the weird mushroomy clouds pitched and rolled.

She sat on a crowded train on another rainy day. The girl opposite her was reading: her head bent forwards into the book, her serious brows drawn together. She had milky skin and thick arms. When she stood to get off the train, their legs brushed, smooth, shaved knees, and Audrey could have shuddered: longing rushed into her pelvis. She felt savage. She was surprised when anyone spoke to her.

She moved in with Adam’s friend Claire for the first few weeks. Sweet, languid Claire, who welcomed her wholeheartedly, who boiled eggs and made cups of tea in the morning. She and Adam had met in a hostel in Byron Bay—We were in a four-bed dorm, and the other two people started fucking one night, and we had to evacuate, Adam had explained, though Claire told it differently. There were always friends calling by the house. Audrey was grateful for the noise. For three weeks she occupied the bright room at the end of the hallway. Claire’s son, Elliott, six years old and clever, slept in the room opposite. Audrey heard him moving around in there at night, turning lights off and on, singing to himself and reading aloud, shuffling down the hall to his mother’s bedroom.

The Redfern streets were sleepy in the mornings. The train to the hospital took half an hour. Just before Westmead there was a mason with a sign that said MONUMENTAL MEMORIALS and sometimes Audrey chanted the words to herself like a skipping rhyme while she walked. The big hospital was a terrifying, brutalist building. It seemed to take up the entire suburb. The Children’s Hospital was at the end of the road, orange and terracotta coloured, opposite flats and motels. It was quiet in the mornings, but by the time Audrey left for the day, there were kids on the play equipment out front and people smoking by the entrance, waiting at the bus stop. Everyone wore crabbed, hesitant smiles.

The Camperdown ward staff seemed surprised when she said she’d come from child protection. They all said how young she looked. Audrey worked to remember names and answers to questions. She tried to summon up things from the only hospital placement she’d ever done, years ago. That first week was a deluge.

On Friday afternoon she walked to the station with one of the other workers.

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