Zebra

by Debra Adelaide

  Perhaps at some point someone had told her that despite that he still could get sick and need to stay for more than a day, and perhaps she’d even registered it, but not consciously. She toured the ward like a mere visitor, as if inspecting a property with an idea to rent, humouring the nurse, taking note of sagging window blinds and peeling paint, avoiding saying thank you but nodding and smiling.

  Within twenty-four hours she was familiar enough with the cramped kitchen routine: expertly juggling styrofoam cups and teabags, sidestepping other parents, opening the fridge door only so much, recognising when not to look another parent in the eye. Too soon it was as familiar as home. Within days she was an old hand, and by the time her son went home she had the kitchen dance down smoothly. Within weeks the need for that tour became clear.

  And the children, the other patients, their parents. The parents especially. She rapidly discovered that every parent had a story, many of them too willing to share it. In those first days and weeks she did not want to hear stories of treatments that had failed or stalled, about children who proved to be allergic to certain types of chemotherapy, children who had relapsed, children in or awaiting transplant. Children whose temperatures soared, whose skin burned up, who rejected their medication, whose coughs racked their chests, who were resistant to antibiotics, who had not left the hospital ward for three whole months, three and a week, to be exact. There were parents who were experts, frighteningly well informed, in a way she did not want to be. Experts eager, over-eager, to pass on the wealth of their experience, to welcome her into the strange fraternity that hunched in the ward corridors, speaking in hushed voices, nursing illicit cups of coffee away from the signs on every wall saying no hot drinks in the ward!, apparently the very worst hazard of all.

  She resisted their embraces, their empathetic smiles. She was suspicious, like a potential recruit to a special cult. She would not be approached on the subway walk by people in skivvies urging pamphlets on her. But as she became accustomed to the ward, she could see it was a secret society, a sorority of trackpants and takeaway dinners, dressing-gowns and cup noodles. Members of this cult huddled in the dimly lit corridors pretending they hadn’t just returned from a quick cigarette on the fire stairs. Membership did not seem optional. She never wanted to belong. One night a father passed her a beer from a stash under his daughter’s bed, and she thrilled with complicit joy. Unlike hot drinks, alcohol was never expressly forbidden, but there was the deep sense that someone called Matron would spring them and turf them out. As the weeks passed she tried not to be so cold, but still, she could not roam the wards with jolly purpose like other mothers, paying visits here and there and organising hairdressing and massages. Put your name on the list below, Janelle will come on Wednesday afternoons to do Mum’s nails!! It smacked too much of a cruise ship somewhere. One of the fathers, to whom initiating conversations and cheerily exchanging information was second nature, organised weekend barbecues on the service balcony off the parents’ room. She said she would go but then did not. She wanted to do what her son did and lie in bed with the sheets pulled up over her face. Her son refused to be the prime audience for the clown doctors, the Wiggles, the footy stars. He remained aloof and unresponsive to the play therapists and the volunteer teachers, the music therapists and the Rent-a-Grandmas. It was not fun, having cancer, and he would not pretend to make it so. The isolation ward was the worst, the ultimate punishment, when his temperature was so high he had to be kept away from everyone but his parent. The bonus was his own bathroom, the downside was that by the time the meals arrived in Isolation, a floor higher, they were even more grey and limp.

  But here in Isolation was a small miracle: one day a dog appeared, led by a pet-therapy volunteer, both wearing red bandannas. No hot drinks allowed, but a dog? And what a beautiful dog: Pansy was sleek and black and licked her son on the forearm then snuggled in for a nap. He patted the dog and smiled, and she thought it was the first smile of his she’d seen in weeks, and then when another parent down the hall was yelling about health risks and dogs, and a nurse explained that these dogs couldn’t transmit any disease, he cuddled Pansy closer, and shut his eyes and breathed in her normal doggy scent.

  And then she cried, because that was when, for the first time in months, she allowed herself to imagine that he might recover.

  She learned to count her blessings, to accept clichés, to not be so bothered by the split infinitive. You count your blessings.

  The logistics of managing a job and the needs of the older children were eye-crossing at times, but she could see that the alternative was worse. In the day ward, Daffodil North, she met mothers who had no job and only one child. And that child had cancer. Frustrated and exhausted with work that she could take home, or rather to the hospital, reports and spreadsheets, she felt that these things were also a blessing. Entire hours at a time could disappear while filling fields in Excel documents or ensuring objectives were met in prose that was thrillingly peppered with acronyms. Which she was also learning to use in the ward. ALL. AML. The other mothers were able only to focus on their child and that illness. Their emotions were hogtied, their need for the child to recover undiluted by any other demands.

  All through the first few months people commented on how well she was coping, but there was no mysterious art to it, no great show of maternal courage: she coped because she had to. There were the other children requiring attention, there was no question of not coping. She absolutely had to cook their dinners, supervise homework, and get them to school on time. She saved her tears for the private times. Mostly.

  Sure, they need to nearly kill them in order to cure them. That was an Irish mother doing the kitchen dance, flicking the door of the microwave and opening the fridge and stirring something on the pot as she minced around trying not to be in the way. She was awed by the Irish mother’s composure, the practised ease with which she prepared food at all hours of the day and night for her ravenous child on steroids. Her child was entering maintenance – what was that again? she knew she’d been told, just couldn’t remember – while her son was only a few months into treatment. You’ll get used to it, the Irish mother said.

  There was a vast part of her as spongy as jelly when she heard that voice. Any Irish nurse inspired her with a total belief in their powers of healing. This matter-of-fact mother assured her that her own son would practically die, yet survive. It was strangely comforting.

  Fuck this, said another mother, who then disappeared for two weeks, leaving her bewildered husband to sleep by the cot of their baby daughter. The child cried when her father left her to go to the bathroom, cried when he headed out for a cup of coffee – which he never brought back to the ward – cried for no reason at all or every reason. Even when Pet Therapy Pansy appeared, she cried, standing wailing in her cot with her fist knuckling her mouth, while her father remained calm and smiling.

  She watched from the bedside of her own son across the ward. She wanted to rush over and grab the phone whenever his wife rang and yell at her to come back here at once, while at the same time wishing she could be that woman. Fuck this, she now thought a lot, and realised that finally she had stopped saying thank you.

  Nourishment

  She was in aisle nine – sauces, condiments, seasonings – and had her hand on the packet of star anise when he rang.

  ‘I’ve googled another recipe,’ he said. ‘This one says cinnamon stick and cardamom pods and palm sugar.’

  She tossed the star anise in the trolley and looked along the rows of tiny bottles. Cardamom, ground. Cayenne pepper. Chilli flakes. Chilli powder. Cinnamon, ground. No cardamom pods. ‘Ground cardamom will have to do.’

  ‘No, it says pods. And cinnamon sticks. Can you get cinnamon sticks?’

  ‘Seeds or ground, it won’t matter.’

  ‘Not seeds. Pods. Cardamom pods.’

  ‘Seeds, pods, same thing. Anyway, the ground will have to do.’ She spotted the
cinnamon sticks in the next rack and tossed them in.

  ‘Are you sure? This recipe sounds a lot better than the other one.’ His voice had crept up in pitch, like when he was angry, uncertain, fearful.

  ‘Trust me. It will work the same.’ Mary wedged the phone close to her ear, keeping her voice low. She despised shoppers who did this. Especially the men, standing blankly before the stacks of nappies, saying did you want infants’ or toddlers’ size. Asking what was the difference between skim and Lite White. There weren’t any chicken necks and would the dog eat hearts. She could always see the women at the other end of the phone sighing.

  ‘It also says to wash the meat.’

  ‘What? Oh, and I’ll get more fish sauce. Wash meat?’

  ‘I don’t know. You skim it then strain it then wash it. That’s what it says.’

  ‘Okay, I’ll look at it when I get home.’ She spoke even lower, as if they were conspiring in a robbery. ‘I’m just grabbing the last few things then I’ll be out of here.’

  ‘Palm sugar,’ he said again before she said goodbye and pressed the button. She put the phone into the trolley too but before she rounded the corner into dairy it clattered through to the floor.

  Andy watched as she lifted it with the chicken-patterned potholders. It was the biggest stockpot, too big for him to hold and pour the steaming liquid into the bowl. The mush of meat plopped into the strainer, the bones sticking out grey and bare. She wiped the scummy tidemark from around the inside of the pot, rinsed it under the hot tap, and placed it back on the stove.

  ‘Get me the other strainer, can you?’

  He fossicked in the drawer for the one with the wooden handle.

  ‘The conical strainer is better,’ she explained. ‘See how the mesh is finer? You get a clearer soup that way. But the handle is broken.’ It sat askew in the bowl. She took it out and placed the other one over the stockpot, poured the stock back in, and turned up the flame.

  ‘Now what?’

  ‘Now you taste it.’ Mary held the serving spoon up to his lips.

  ‘It’ll be too hot.’

  ‘No, it isn’t.’ She sipped from her side of the spoon. ‘Tasting good.’

  He pursed his lips, touched the spoon with them, then recoiled. ‘How can you do that! It’s boiling.’

  She smiled. ‘Asbestos lips.’ She sipped again. ‘Tastes beautiful to me.’

  He finally tried it. ‘Hey, that’s just like the one in the noodle restaurant.’

  ‘Wait until it’s simmered another hour or so, it’ll be perfect then. It needs a bit more fish sauce, though.’

  She showed him how to skim the fat off the surface of the stock, spooning it into an empty yoghurt tub. He copied her movements with the smaller spoon, dribbling fat onto the kitchen bench as it wobbled from stockpot to tub. She leaned against the bench, holding in her impatience to do the job quickly and efficiently, watching the spoon move back and forth to the yoghurt tub until he’d scooped most of the fat out.

  ‘Sometimes at school,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘I say yoggit. Yoggit. Just like that.’

  ‘What, so kids think you’re English?’ She tore off a piece of paper towel and mopped up the bench under his spoon.

  ‘Not really. Just for fun. Hey, what about the palm sugar?’

  ‘I didn’t get it.’

  ‘You forgot it.’ That pitch in his voice again.

  ‘I didn’t forget it, I just didn’t get it. We can use brown sugar; it only needs a spoonful.’

  ‘It won’t taste the same.’

  ‘Trust me.’ She sealed the yoghurt tub and dropped it into the bin.

  He poked at the meat and bones heaped into a bowl. ‘Now it says we have to wash the meat.’

  ‘Andy.’ He looked at her. ‘I refuse even to think about what that might mean. All we have to do is pick out the biggest bones and stuff. We can save the scraps for Tommy.’

  Together, with a pair of tongs each, they picked off the loose bits of gristle and lifted out the largest bones and lumps of meat, placing it all back into the stockpot for the second boil. She had bought the beef bones and osso buco from the Vietnamese butcher, where the owner and his wife worked every day, seven days a week, in the cleanest overalls she had ever seen butchers wear. Mary hadn’t consulted any recipe, but Andy had, researching it like a school project, bringing his laptop onto the bench, comparing sites and chewing his bottom lip as he read over the instructions. Palm sugar. Meat washing. It was why she disliked following recipes.

  After she cleared up the curls of onion and garlic skins, put away the spices and rinsed the strainers and bowls, she went back to her bookcase. Ikea. Sixty-nine dollars. She timed it, and got it assembled in twenty minutes, no swearing. She was getting better at this, though to be fair it was probably the company’s simplest item of furniture. She positioned it in the kitchen and began moving the books across from the stack on the floor that had been there too long, wiping the dust as she went.

  ‘I don’t even know why you want a bookcase for your recipe books,’ he said, eyeing her from the doorway. ‘You never use them.’

  Then his phone chirped. He turned away, curling the entire upper half of his body into the phone just as his father did, as if they were spies.

  The soup was boiling furiously by the time she finished the books, and she lifted the lid, turning off the gas. The broth was rich and fragrant, the heavy saltiness of the meat closing like a fist around the first delicate waft of the spices. She breathed it in, catching the smell of star anise before it floated off, the black pepper and the cardamom. Andy came over to sniff deeply too.

  ‘All those bones, all that marrow and gristle,’ she said. ‘It’ll be so nourishing, full of protein.’

  It was true she never used her recipe books. Some she had never even looked at, let alone used. But it was the idea of the books. She collected them, glanced through them, then replaced them on the stacks of other books, returning to recipes in her memory or imagination. Once she had decided to collect the stray recipes, all the ones cut from magazines and newspapers, the ones on scraps of notepaper in her mother’s or a neighbour’s hand. She would write them neatly in a book and leave it for the children, for when she was older, or gone. It would contain their favourite dishes, the ones she had never written down nor even read, the ones she could have cooked in her sleep. They might have no idea how she made these dishes that had sustained them all through their childhood: the macaroni cheese, the spinach flan, the crumbed chicken, the jellies made with real fruit, not from a packet. She had even cooked her own baby rusks, way back when Frances was teething, tiny bagel-shaped ones enriched with malt, a touch of honey.

  The book was almost blank, the recipes still in her head. Mary took it now and placed it next to Classic American Recipes. The last book she stacked was a vegetarian cookbook, bought when Frances was thirteen. She flipped it open. Spiced risotto cakes. Tabbouli. Lentil bolognese. She couldn’t remember either of them ever using it. At that time, it seemed to her now, her daughter had lived entirely on a diet of soft white foods: cauliflower cheese and mashed potato, bread and bananas. Yoghurt and vanilla milkshakes.

  By the time the broth was ready for its final straining the boy was bored, back in his bedroom hunched over his laptop. Mary glanced in. Facebook. She went back to the kitchen, threw away the bones and boiled onions, and took some of the cooled meat over to the dog’s bowl. Tommy came sliding into the kitchen out of nowhere, swallowed the meal in a few gulps, and looked up with his tail wagging. He followed her hopefully and sat behind her at the sink while she washed the strainers and other utensils and wiped down the bench. When she was done she went back to the boy’s room. He was on the phone again. She walked across to the other bedroom, pushed the door, and stepped inside.

  The room was dark, close. She shut her eyes and breathed in the smell. Perfume – she had no idea which one
; there were several brands neatly set out on the desk – stale sheets, leather shoes, hairspray, incense, musty clothes – the hamper was full – and under it all a smell of apples, fainter than faint. When she opened her eyes she saw that Tommy had quietly jumped onto the bed. She sat next to him, on the rumpled sheets, the only mess in the otherwise tidy room. There were several books next to the pillows, an empty shoulder bag gaping open, and an uncapped pen that had bled to death leaving a blue stain on the sheet. Next to it was a DVD in an unmarked cover, the disc blank except for the sticker of a professional photographer. Mary sighed, rose and went over to the wardrobe. Inside, every second or third hanger was empty. She leaned down to pick a hairpin off the carpet in front of the mirrored doors, then placed it in the glass dish on the desk. There was a mug next to the vase of incense sticks. It held a half-inch of black coffee with a film of scum. No sugar, of course.

  Andy appeared at the doorway. ‘We should go now.’

  ‘Okay, okay. Come on, Tommy, out of there.’ Holding the mug, she shut the door and leaned her forehead against it for a few moments, her eyes shut. Then she walked quickly along the hall and took the mug to the kitchen where she ran the hot water into it for a long time.