The Good Son

by Greg Fleet

  The ‘concerts’ were almost always performed by Malcolm. He had a good voice, was a confident singer and his guitar playing was sublime. Malcolm usually began with the classic ‘California Dreamin’’ by the Mamas & the Papas and often other staff members would join him on backing vocals. Sophie had decided, though, that because James may at some point have to pretend to be the son of one or more of the people in the room, he should never join in. Instead, he would stand at the back silently wishing that he was up on stage. For the sake of everyone concerned it was fortunate that he wasn’t. I can tell you from personal experience that, for all of his good points, James Rogers has one of the worst singing voices in the southern hemisphere.

  There would usually come a time in each concert when people would start calling out requests:

  ‘Play “Lili Marlene”!’ ‘We want Vivaldi!’ There were also occasional demands for more rocking tracks – ‘Do “Sympathy for the Devil”’ – but not often.

  Most of the requests were from a much earlier time. A time that Malcolm had little knowledge of and even less interest in. His response to these requests was almost always the same. When someone excitedly called out for him to play ‘I Do Like To Be Beside the Seaside’, he would reply: ‘I don’t know that one, but I can play Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World”.’

  And every time, the crowd would love it.

  Sophie would often hear one or other of the women saying something along the lines of ‘Oh, dinner and a concert. It’s like Mother’s Day.’

  Sophie would softly smile to herself. ‘Yes, it is just like Mother’s Day. And so it should be.’

  One woman seemed to feel the curse of sundown worse than anyone else. Her name was Charlotte Durham, a kind and nervous woman of eighty-five. She had suffered two heart attacks and Alzheimer’s was now displacing her memories like an overflowing bath, but she still had occasional moments of gentle clarity. She liked to paint deep and rich still lifes and did so most afternoons; her skill had won her prizes in another time. She could now only paint things that were directly in front of her because everything else was slipping away, but her paintings were beautiful and some hung on the walls of the centre. Charlotte had been a wife and mother and when she was lucid her default setting appeared to be the care and nurture of others – she was often offering to help the staff with whatever work they were doing and was always inquiring as to people’s welfare. James imagined her to be a woman who at one point would have approached life with a smiling ease, but whose brow had become steadily more furrowed with confusion the closer she got to what ultimately awaits us all.

  Sophie and James decided that Charlotte should be the next person to experience a visit from her ‘son’. Numerous times she had mentioned to Sophie that her son Billy was a chef and that every couple of weeks or so he would come to her house and cook her an amazing dinner, and that she was expecting Billy to come by ‘any day now’.

  Billy had been a chef at DiVada, a famous restaurant in St Kilda. Sophie took a chance and rang the restaurant’s owner, Johnny DiVada, and after briefly explaining her connection to Charlotte, she asked him what kind of person Billy had been. According to Johnny DiVada, Billy had not only been an excellent chef; he had also been beloved by his co-workers and his customers, and a very dear friend of Johnny’s. But Billy also had his demons (don’t we all). He had a low-level heroin habit that he had maintained for a number of years. His drug use had never affected his ability to be a good person or a talented and innovative chef, but it did one day unexpectedly kill him.

  It seemed that once Charlotte Durham heard about the death of her son, she had gone downhill very quickly. She was in complete denial about Billy’s death, and with her mental and physical health failing rapidly she was moved into the Peggy Day Aged Care Home, where she would tell Sophie Glass about a wonderful son and how any day now he would be coming to cook her dinner.

  Hi. How’s it all going? As your narrator, I think part of my job should be checking in on you, the reader, every so often, just to see if you are all right. In my opinion, too many narrators try to hide. They try to keep themselves robotic and strictly functional, taking care not to become a part of what is going down. I say, if we are here and you know we are here, we might as well check in from time to time, make sure everybody is comfortable, that everybody has a drink. That everyone has a piece of toast. In fact, if I was you, I would get up right now and make myself some toast, and then come back and read a bit more as I ate.

  ‘But what if I get Vegemite on the clean pages of the book?’

  What if you do? I say, damn the torpedoes, go for it. Sometimes it’s the risk of Vegemite stains that gives life meaning.

  When Sophie told him what she and James were planning for Charlotte Durham, Johnny DiVada was thrilled and offered to provide them with whatever food they needed, cooked by him personally to Billy’s recipes. Sophie told James about her conversation with Johnny, and it was all systems go. James’ only real objection to the plan was that, as a good cook himself, he didn’t want to source the food from DiVada’s; he wanted a chance to show off what he could do in the kitchen.

  ‘We don’t need to get the food from a restaurant! I’ve got mad food skills. I’m like a thin, Anglo George Calombaris.’

  ‘Really? Can you cook high-end, innovative Italian food?’

  ‘I can make beef ragout,’ replied a dejected James.

  ‘Yes, James, but do you know how to stuff a zucchini flower with crab meat and fennel?’

  ‘Stuff a what?’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Sophie. ‘We are going to go with Johnny cooking Billy’s recipes. But look, apparently Billy’s thing was to serve very small courses, and lots of them. Make your beef ragout by all means, and I’ll ask Johnny if we can shoehorn it in between a couple of really excellent dishes. Okay? And make sure it’s good.’

  ‘Of course it will be good. I’m a really good cook!’

  ‘Yeah?’ said Sophie. ‘So you keep saying. Currently I only have your word for that.’

  ‘Well, it’s true. Come over to my place for dinner one night and find out for yourself,’ said James defensively.

  ‘Okay, I will,’ replied an equally tetchy Sophie.

  ‘Good,’ said James.

  ‘When?’

  ‘How about tomorrow night?’

  ‘Fine!’

  Suddenly, they were both smiling.

  Hi, it’s me again. Sometimes when we plant a seed, nothing happens. No matter how much we water it, no matter how green our thumb – sometimes the seed and the earth and water and sun all get together and say, ‘You know what? Fuck it. We’re going to have the day off.’ If we as humans have learned anything from our time on this planet (and I’m not suggesting that we have) it’s that trying to force nature to do things is a pretty dumb idea. Reap the whirlwind, etc. I’m not a scientist but I reckon that nature is massive, and by now, surely, it must be pretty fucked off with humans trying to tell it what to do. Maybe sometimes things are just not meant to grow until they want to.

  But other times, you plant a seed and it grows crazy beautiful. It grows bigger, it grows faster, it grows more colourful and more alive than you could ever have imagined. Fortunately and thrillingly for Sophie and James, this is the way that Charlotte Durham’s seed grew.

  The next day, as James didn’t have to go in to the Peggy Day centre, he spent the day preparing for his and Sophie’s first official date. At about midday he rode his bike to the Prahran market to buy all of the ingredients he would need for what he hoped would be an impressive meal. James loved the sensory overload that came with big markets. The smells, the sights, the sounds, the tastes. As a twenty-year-old studying art history he had travelled to Europe, where he spent more time in food markets than he did in galleries. When his friends went to the Louvre, James went to the north of France to visit the biggest cheese market he’d ever seen. Instead of focusing on the great museums of London, James went to Soho and hung out at his favourite
market, Neal’s Yard. While others soaked up the culture of Francis Bacon, James soaked up the culture of actual bacon and unfeasibly large wheels of Jarlsberg. Although he had been raised in a house where the Bible was considered, if at all, as fiction, and as an adult he had remained happily agnostic and blissfully ignorant of organised religions, he supposed that what he experienced in markets was probably what other people experienced in churches. He could drink the wine and eat the flesh without having to feel the guilt of imagining that they belonged to a man on a cross who had already suffered far too much for the ungrateful masses.

  To be honest, though, I think I might be crapping on a bit here. I mean, James told me some of this stuff, but I’m probably exaggerating a fair bit with the rest.

  Hey, relax, champ. This is a book, not real life. It is allowed to be over-the-top.

  James had thought a lot about the dinner he would make for Sophie. James thought a lot about Sophie generally so I guess that kind of makes sense.

  The first course, as James had planned it, was to be oysters with a citrus vinaigrette. James was good with vinaigrettes. The main course would be fish cooked in chilli and soy – while it wasn’t a dish that was about to win him any awards for originality, everyone who ever tried it had enjoyed it. It was a safe bet.

  In between these two courses he’d planned to serve a tom yum soup. When Sophie and James’ argument about what to feed Charlotte Durham had miraculously turned into them planning their first date, James had asked Sophie if there was anything in particular that she would like to eat, and she’d mentioned how much she loved tom yum.

  It wasn’t until he was halfway home on the tram, smiling with pride and anticipation, that James realised while he too loved tom yum soup and had always intended to make it himself, he had never actually got around to it.

  ‘That’s cool,’ thought James as he got off at his stop, ‘I can make tom yum soup. How hard can it be?’

  Pretty fucking hard, as it would turn out. Pretty fucking hard.

  When James was at the market, despairing over what ingredients to buy for the soup, he called Cash Driveway.

  ‘Hello, James.’

  ‘Hi, Cash. You sound like you’ve been running.’

  ‘I have,’ said Cash. ‘I’ve been running away from something.’

  ‘Interesting,’ said James. ‘Listen, do you happen to know a recipe for tom yum soup?’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ said Cash and then added, ‘Do I sound burned?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Do I sound as though I have recently lost most of my hair in a fire?’

  ‘No,’ said James, puzzled. ‘You sound reliably hirsute.’

  ‘I hate to disappoint you, but we here at Driveway Industries have just suffered a catastrophe. Do you remember that fully operational petrol-powered car that I was building out of matchsticks? It just burned itself to the ground and exploded.’

  ‘Cash! Was anybody hurt?’

  ‘Artists are always being hurt, James. It comes with the territory. It burned all the grass from the front of my studio and exactly half of the hair from my head. Now, what’s this about soup?’

  ‘Sophie is coming over tonight. And I am making her dinner. But I told her that I can make tom yum soup and I can’t. I need you to make some for me.’

  ‘I can’t make tom yum soup!’

  ‘But you just told me that you could!’

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ said Cash Driveway. ‘I told you that I knew a recipe. The recipe is: go to Thai-tanic and have Graham make you two bowls of it.’

  James took Cash’s advice. On the way back from the market he stopped at Thai-tanic. Graham was behind the counter chopping chillies with what seemed to James to be a threateningly large cleaver of some kind. As it was four p.m. there was no one else in the restaurant.

  ‘Hey, Graham,’ said James, feeling intimidated as he always did when addressing the chef and owner of Thai-Tanic. He wasn’t exactly sure why he felt intimidated; it may have been that every time he entered the restaurant Graham was wielding some kind of enormous cooking implement that could easily have been a weapon. Despite this, he’d only ever really had one confrontation with Graham and that was about a year ago. James had said to Graham, ‘Man, you make the best beef rendang I’ve ever had – but rendang is Malaysian, and you run a Thai restaurant. Are you secretly Malaysian?’

  Graham went off his head. ‘What! Malaysian? I’m not Malaysian! I’m fifth-generation Thai. I can cook beef rendang because I’m a good chef. You should be very careful who you start calling Malaysian!’ he said, waving a large knife dangerously close to James’ face. ‘I mean, look at my name – Graham. Have you ever met a Malaysian person called Graham? No, you haven’t, because Graham is a Thai name.’

  Since this awkward interaction, they had got along fine. James never mentioned Malaysia again and Graham did his best to ignore the perceived insult.

  The day that James was having Sophie over for dinner, Graham looked up as James entered and greeted him. ‘James, my friend, one beef rendang to take away?’

  ‘Not today, Graham. Today I want two serves of tom yum chicken soup.’

  ‘Wow,’ said Graham. ‘That’s a double surprise. No beef rendang, and you’re ordering two things. That implies two people. Is one a lady?’

  ‘Well, yes . . .’ said James, blushing.

  ‘Ha!’ said Graham. ‘And you like her! Your face has gone as red as a beep.’

  ‘As a what?’ asked James.

  ‘As a beep . . .eeproot.’

  ‘Do you mean beetroot?’ asked James, puzzled.

  ‘Hey!’ Graham was getting scary. ‘I’m the chef. It’s beeproot!’

  ‘Okay,’ said James, feeling intimidated. ‘In any case, yes. I like her.’

  ‘All right. Two bowls of tom yum coming up. Give me ten minutes.’

  James did what he was told.

  When the soup was ready, Graham called James over to the counter. ‘There you go. Chicken tom yum, and it is really fucking good.’

  ‘I’m sure it is,’ said James. ‘Everything you make is good.’

  ‘Are you going to tell her that you made it?’

  James felt like he’d been slapped in the face. ‘What? Why would I do that?’

  ‘It’s just a thing,’ said Graham. ‘People do it. Especially with soup. It’s a kind of human failing.’

  ‘Well, I’m not going to . . .’ James saw Graham picking up one of his large cleavers. ‘Okay!’ he said much louder than he intended. ‘Yes! I’m going to tell her that I made it. But only because it’s so good and I want her to like me!’

  Graham mulled this over for a second before replying, ‘Yeah, what the fuck. Why not. I guess it’s a kind of compliment.’ James’ relief was palpable; he exhaled so much that he felt he lost weight.

  ‘Okay,’ said Graham. ‘That will be twenty-four dollars.’

  ‘It’s usually nine dollars a bowl! That makes it eighteen dollars.’

  ‘It’s eighteen dollars for people who don’t pretend to have made it themselves. The extra six dollars goes into my honesty box,’ Graham explained calmly.

  ‘Where is your honesty box?’ asked James.

  ‘In my pocket,’ said Graham. ‘Enjoy your soup, James.’

  ‘I will,’ he said as he turned to leave.

  ‘It smells great,’ Graham smiled. ‘One day you’ll have to give me the recipe.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said James sheepishly as he walked out the door. ‘I might just do that.’

  As he left Thai-Tanic, it occurred to James that he couldn’t remember the last time that something normal had happened in his life.

  And, to his surprise, he didn’t really care.

  When James got home he decanted the soup into a saucepan and got rid of all the evidence, forcing the takeaway bag and the containers deep into the rubbish bin. He spent the next hour and a half preparing the rest of the meal and tidying up the flat. When I say ‘tidying up’, I mean more ‘moving things around�
�, and when I say ‘moving things around’, I mean more ‘opening the door to Cash’s room and throwing everything non-essential in there’. Cash was going out for the night, to a ‘marijuana smokers against the patriarchy’ lecture. So it was just going to be James and Sophie. The two of them. Together. Alone.

  Finally, with everything just about ready, James went into his bedroom to get dressed. He put on a clean pair of jeans, a collared purple shirt and a grey jacket. He stood in front of the mirror before turning to the photo of Charlie Girl and asking, ‘What do think, pup?’

  He looked good, and if Charlie Girl had actually been there and been able to speak English, she would have told him so.

  ‘Yeah, you’re right, I look like an idiot.’

  He dumped that look and went for something more casual, a simple light-blue T-shirt under the jacket. At one point while looking into the mirror he tried pulling the sleeves of the jacket up to his elbows. He looked like a low-level drug dealer from an episode of Miami Vice.

  ‘How about this?’

  If a photograph of a dog with a ball in its mouth could have uttered the words ‘Don Johnson’, Charlie Girl certainly would have.

  In the end he compromised. He wore the T-shirt with the purple shirt over it, unbuttoned. He wanted to look casual, like he didn’t care. He wasn’t. He did.

  Five minutes after he finished dressing the buzzer in his flat went off.

  James had no idea that it had taken Sophie numerous glances at her reflection in the downstairs window, a few adjustments to her hair and six false starts before she finally gathered the courage to press the buzzer marked ‘James Rogers. Unit 6’.

  Ain’t love grand?

  Sophie handed James a bottle of wine and then picked up the photo of Charlie Girl (which James had strategically placed on view) and said, ‘Oh my god! Is this Charlie? She is too beautiful.’ That was a good sign. ‘Love my dog, love me,’ thought James, brazenly inverting a T-shirt slogan.