Where We Begin

by Christie Nieman

  ‘Making something special for you tonight,’ she said.

  I immediately recognised the makings of Skip Curry. That was what we’d called it on the unfortunate occasions that Mum had decided to cook when I was a kid. Mum hadn’t made Skip Curry for years. The more high-powered her work became, the less she cooked – she’d become the takeaway queen, leaving the schlepping in the kitchen to Dad. But when I was a kid, some nights she’d make a snap decision to get all ‘mothery’, as she called it, and to cook for her family. But she could only make one thing, this one terrible thing, and it was clear to me now where she had learned to make it: here, in this house, about as far removed from any authentic curry-making experience as you could get. Suddenly the awfulness of Skip Curry made a lot of sense.

  I pulled up a chair and began to help Bette cube the apples. I told her that Mum used to make the same thing for me and she turned to me with a brighter look on her face than I had seen before.

  ‘She did?’ she said. ‘Oh, I’m so glad. I taught her when she was a kid. I wanted her to be able to cook something nice for her husband, you know? And for her family.’

  ‘And she taught me to cook it, too,’ I said to Bette. ‘So I can be your perfect sous-chef.’

  Bette smiled to herself and tunelessly hummed while she stirred the onions in the pot. ‘It’s from the Women’s Weekly,’ she said. ‘South-Indian Chicken Korma.’

  I tipped the chicken pieces into a plastic bag full of flour and shook them about. ‘We call it “Skip Curry” at my place,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, that’s funny,’ she said. ‘Why do you call it that?’

  ‘Oh, you know, because . . .’ But watching Grandma concoct the Anglicised goo, it suddenly seemed unfair to ridicule it. It must have been bold and cutting edge for her to even attempt a curry back then. She didn’t have the benefit of a multicultural inner-city experience like me. ‘You know, I don’t actually know.’

  Instead I told her the Skip Curry anecdote my dad liked to tell. How one day when Mum and I were home together when I was four, Dad came home from work to find Mum asleep on the floor and me cooking Skip Curry for dinner. The way he told it was full of humour – fancy coming home and finding his two girls had switched roles. Mum and I had been playing Mums and Babies together, the way he told it. I was the mum and Cathy was my baby and I made her a bed of cushions and sang her a lullaby, and Mum had fallen asleep for real, a really deep and lovely sleep from all my lovely singing, while I actually made a pretty good start on the Skip Curry, chopping the onions and the apples, and arranging everything. He was lucky he got home when he did, he said, because I was getting ready to light the stove.

  Bette laughed and shook her head, enjoying imagining me as a precocious four year old. I handed the floured chicken to her and she tossed it into the hot oil with the onion and browned it off, and then scraped in the sultanas and the cubed apples. She spooned in curry powder from a tin and poured water over it all and then covered it. She tipped white rice from a no-brand bag into another big pot filled with an excessive amount of boiling water, just the way Mum used to. I suddenly realised I was quite looking forward to tasting it again. I remembered that after Mum had given up on it I kept making it myself and adding things to it – authentic Afghan and Indian and Sri Lankan tweaks I’d picked up from other families: adding things, taking other things out, upping the spice, frying it off first, trying to make it just less awful somehow; trying to make it what a curry was supposed to be. But one day I stopped doing that. Making it and changing it didn’t seem right. The more ‘authentic’ it was, the less authentic, somehow, it seemed to me. I’d decided that the recipe had to remain pure and untouched, awful as it was. It came from my mum. It was one of the few things that had. So at first I left it alone, and then I stopped making it altogether.

  After the curry had bubbled too long on the stovetop, Bette set about stirring the pot as vigorously as she could so that the overcooked chicken had absolutely no chance of retaining any recognisable shape.

  ‘Don’t hurt your poor arm, Grandma,’ I said, but she kept pounding away at the goo until it was mush. I tried not to grimace at the slop the meal had become.

  ‘Do you still play the piano, Grandma?’ I said.

  ‘Oh. No. I don’t play anymore.’

  ‘Oh, I just wondered because I saw there was a piano in the coffee room. Those cookies you made were out of this world, by the way,’ I said.

  ‘Oh! I’m glad you liked them,’ Bette said, out of breath with stirring vigour.

  ‘I loved them. You’ll have to teach me how to make them.’

  ‘I could do that.’

  ‘Baking is clearly your thing,’ I said, and then to make up for what might have been perceived as a backhander I said, ‘Could you maybe play something on that piano for me sometime?’

  ‘Oh. No I don’t think so, dear.’

  ‘But you could probably remember something, right? I’d love to be able to play the piano.’

  ‘I don’t like to go in that room when we’re not having coffee. I like to keep it nice.’

  ‘But it wouldn’t be messy to just play a little something?’ I tried, turning on some granddaughter sweetness. ‘Please, Grandma, for me?’

  ‘We’ll see,’ said Grandma, but she was shut down like the lid of the piano itself, a wooden tight-lippedness over the keys of her teeth.

  I watched Bette tip in black-and-gold thickened cream. It would have killed Nassim to see what I was seeing. I smiled to myself at the thought, and then I imagined what a child of mine and Nassim’s might cook – some weird Dutch-German-English-Lebanese fusion, no doubt. I wondered which superpower was greater, the van Leeuwen cooking incompetence, or the El-Amin culinary skill and talent. But I stopped myself short. I couldn’t think like that. I shouldn’t think like that.

  As Bette began dishing out the watery and insipid-looking pale yellow curry onto the plates of over-boiled rice, Hessel came in the back door scuffing his boots. Earlier in the day, through the window at Bromley Cairn, I had watched Hessel drive in slowly, pulling the horse float behind, and then carefully, so carefully, walk Europa Pearl down the ramp and back into the stable. We hadn’t seen anything of him since.

  ‘How’s Polly?’ Bette asked him now, and Hessel shook his head at her sadly. It wasn’t until we were sitting that he finally spoke again. ‘Vet should never have sent us home. It’s actually quite a turn she’s taken,’ he said.

  I thought he was going to continue, but instead he coughed and scooped in the first mouthful of his dinner, and began to chew with an old-man click in his jaw. Bette hummed as she ate, the sound going in and out with the rhythm of her chewing and the breath going up and down at the back of her throat.

  I loaded up my fork and took my first mouthful, a mouthful of this taste from my childhood.

  I was completely unprepared for it.

  So many associations. Too many, each following hard on the heels of the one before. Cooking with Mum while Dad was at work. Plucking out the apple cubes with my little kid fingers and sucking on them, throwing rice to the floor. Mum showing me how to put the sultanas on my teeth like a pirate, how to swoosh the watery sauce around our plates as the sea, shoving apple cubes under the bubble-wrap skins of the chicken drumstick boats as they sailed off over the ocean . . .

  I forced it in, that curry, laden with too many memories and too much cream. It was hard for me to swallow. Bette and Hessel hadn’t noticed. And when finally Bette stood, stacking plates, busy-busy, I stood too.

  ‘Thank you, Grandma,’ I said. ‘Thank you for a lovely dinner. I’ll say goodnight now –’ My throat became too tight to go on and I stepped back quickly and shut the bedroom door behind me.

  And I sat on the bed and finally pulled the brown paper package out of my bag and held it in my hands.

  23

  Dr Honeycott had been my doctor for as long as I could remember. He’d given me my tetanus boosters, stitched up my knee, caught my appendicitis early, made
a home visit when I called him because my mother was away and my father was sick – pneumonia, it turned out. His clinic was the first place I went when the test came out positive. Because I trusted him.

  I went straight to him for help. And it shouldn’t have been that hard – it should have been straightforward and easy and quick because I’d caught it early, really early by my calculations, not even a missed period. It should have just been a hiccup – no emotional complications, no need to make a big deal about it or turn my life upside-down or tell anyone else. This wasn’t a problem that couldn’t be solved. Just something between me and my doctor. But when I seated myself in the chair by his desk and folded my hands and said with a sheepish laugh, ‘So, I appear to be pregnant, and I would very much like not to be,’ he’d only returned my levity with a surprised blink and a hard look. A taste of things to come.

  ‘We’ll need to do another one of those,’ he said humourlessly – I was holding the positive test from the shopping centre toilets. He handed me a clear plastic specimen jar. ‘You know where the toilet is.’

  ‘Should have saved my money and my wee,’ I’d joked. But he didn’t even smile.

  When I returned from the toilet he dipped a thin strip in the jar and laid it on the lid to wait.

  ‘So not an intentional pregnancy then?’

  ‘Ah, no.’

  ‘Contraception?’

  ‘Yes, the pill.’

  ‘Any trouble taking it regularly?’

  ‘No. Like clockwork. Reminders in my phone.’

  ‘Have you been physically sick? Gastro? Food poisoning?’

  I told him that I had eaten some old leftovers from the fridge that I shouldn’t have. ‘Biryani,’ I said, and then I’d laughed at this extraneous detail but Dr Honeycott had just waited for details that he could actually work with. He was making me nervous. He’d never made me nervous before. ‘Um . . . I can’t remember when exactly – a while ago. It was a few days old. I did not respond well. Both ends.’ Funny. Oh, I was so funny.

  Dr Honeycott’s eyebrows went up, but still he didn’t smile. ‘You didn’t take the morning-after pill?’

  ‘No, I didn’t even think of it. Neither did Nassim, might I add.’

  ‘How is Nassim? Is that going well?’

  ‘Very well, thank you. Yes, he’s great.’

  Dr Honeycott considered me for a moment before delivering, matter-of-factly, a little bit of wisdom. ‘The biryani does seem like the likely culprit re contraception, but it is always worth remembering that pregnancy is the natural consequence of sex. From a biological perspective, that’s what sex is for.’

  A flush of adrenaline ran through my body. I said I assumed he explained that to the young men who came to visit him too.

  And he’d smiled then. I’d never seen that smile on my doctor’s face before. It was such a nasty, smug little smile. ‘Boys don’t get pregnant,’ he’d said. He was talking like sex with Nassim was something I should have stopped. Like it was up to me to separate it out from our relationship, up to me to have control over this sort of thing. I thought this, but then I caught myself – I was being stupid. He couldn’t have meant that. And as I began, laughingly, to point out that boys actually make pregnancies, he spoke over the top of me. ‘You always were lively, Anna. I’m guessing you didn’t use condoms then either?’ And then he sighed, as though this was all a bit much.

  I felt gross. I was being chastised. That’s what was going on. This man was chastising me, like I was a naughty schoolgirl.

  ‘So how soon can we do something about this?’ I said, trying to move on. And then he swivelled in his chair to fully face me.

  ‘Are you sure that’s what you want, Anna?’

  Are you sure that’s what you want? That’s what he said. I wasn’t laughing anymore. I told him I had a standard health issue with a standard treatment that I would like him to implement, but he just sat back and looked at me for a long while before he started speaking. He talked like he was reminiscing about the good old days as he explained to me that until only very recently abortion had been illegal in this state. To refer me, he said, he would have needed to hold the belief that termination of my pregnancy was necessary to protect me from serious danger to my life or health. A criterion that would have been, in his opinion, unmet. ‘I think you should know,’ he said, ‘that had the legislation not changed, I would have refused your request for a termination.’

  I stood up immediately and walked to the door. ‘I don’t think this is right, what you’re doing,’ I said.

  ‘I’m not doing anything.’

  ‘I think I’d like to see another doctor.’

  And he simply sat there watching me go, holding his hands open in easy resignation. ‘If that’s what you’d prefer,’ he said. This man who had stitched up my scrapes, dispensed lollipops, warmed up the stethoscope before pressing it to my five-year-old back, put the earpieces into my ears to let me listen to the sound of my own heart . . .

  I’d opened the door without ceremony, without bidding him goodbye, and walked straight out through the waiting room and onto the street. And within an hour I had made my plan. Before Nassim came to stay the night – for our first full night and, I’d decided, our last – I had called the hotline, had an over-the-phone consultation with the foundation that organises for medical abortion kits to be sent to women at home, given them the address of the post office nearest my grandparents’ house, paid with my debit card, and booked myself onto the earliest morning train possible.

  24

  The package was wrapped so tightly, so neatly, that it threw everything else in the weak light of the little lean-to room into fuzzy dishevelled relief. Including myself, I thought. It brought it all back, the feeling I’d had in Dr Honeycott’s office. It shouldn’t have hurt so much. After all, he was just some guy, some guy who happened to be my doctor. But I was in the habit of trusting him and he was the only other person who knew. It felt like what he thought of me mattered.

  The kitchen noises subsided. I heard Bette pass by the bedroom door and head down to the back of the house. I touched the tightly folded edge of the package as I waited for her footsteps to fully retreat, and then, following the line of paper until I could get my fingertips beneath it, I gave it a tug and the paper tore badly, leaving a fuzzy brown edge. Neatness lost – I might as well go with it. I ripped it from top to bottom, revealing the box, then laid the contents out on the bed – the only clear spot in the room – one pill carton with five blister-packed pills in it (one separated out from the others and a different shape), a small box of painkillers and anti-nausea tablets, and a fact sheet with instructions and emergency numbers.

  I’d done some research. Of course I’d done some research. I knew the pills could make me sick, especially the second lot. But they assured me when I ordered them over the phone that the painkillers and anti-nausea tablets were quite effective, and that whatever happened there was always their help line. And in turn I assured them that I was no more than an hour away from emergency medical help. I’d had no idea at the time if that was true. But I had assured them.

  I picked up the information sheet. The first pill would ‘arrest’ the foetus, it said, and then, twelve to twenty-four hours later, I should start taking the other pills which would cause my body to expel it. One pill to kill, another to purge.

  Killing. Was that the right way to think of it? Was it part of my own body or wasn’t it? I couldn’t get it clear in my mind. This action I was about to take lay somewhere between committing murder if you listened to some, and cutting my toenails if you listened to others. Impossible to know how to feel about it.

  I retrieved my water bottle from my bag and then popped the first pill out of the blister pack and held it in the palm of my hand. Such a tiny thing. I’d used medical intervention to prevent pregnancy, was this so very different?

  Against my better judgement – I hadn’t been going to do it this way, I’d been going to swallow the pill while doing somet
hing else, without even thinking about it – I placed my hand low on my abdomen. My hand was warm and comforting. The life there, whatever it was, I felt I had to hold while I did this. I slipped the pill between my lips.

  The coating stuck to my tongue. It tasted bitter and chalky and with that taste the sudden realisation of what it actually was struck me and in an instant I spat it out.

  There it lay again in the palm of my hand. I grabbed a tissue from beside the bed and dabbed it dry. Tears budded in my eyes. With shaking fingers I replaced the pill back in its blister, smoothed the broken foil down over the top and sealed it over with ancient sticky tape I found in the old desk drawer. I put it back in its carton, and the carton back in the box. I rewrapped the box, but it was like trying to rewrap a present that a dog had mauled.

  I leaned down and shoved the package under the bed, pushing it hard to force a pile of random rubbish out of the way.

  I sat on the bed and rubbed my face as if by doing that I could rub the mess out of my head that had been put there by Dr Honeycott and the Skip Curry.

  I hadn’t told Bette all of Dad’s story of the Skip Curry. I’d left details out – the way my baby Cathy was really sick and needed looking after; the way that the lullaby I sang for her was actually my own favourite song at the time, ‘You Are My Sunshine’; the way I had stroked Mum’s hair while singing it, just like a good mummy should; and the way that Mum had been in the best and deepest sleep she had ever had, like some sort of enchanted princess, and Dad and I had made our beds around her and slept there all night long, a fairytale family camp-out on the kitchen floor.

  I’d left those details out, not because they weren’t true – they were, I remembered them clearly – but because the story surrounding them was not.

  I’d always known it. I knew it at the time, even at four. The events were the same – the lullaby, the cooking – but not the meaning. Dad had made up a different meaning for my sake. Maybe for his sake too – maybe he needed it as much as I did. He constructed an alternative version, a version I could choose – that Mum and I had been playing, that it was all pretend – to make everything feel safe again.