‘Shouldn’t we take him to hospital?’ I heard him ask later as I twitched on the floor.
‘Doctors! What do they know?’ Mum replied, sounding crosser and more Hungarian than usual. ‘Fark zem.’
So it was a contrast when I had my next anaphylaxis adventure, courtesy of a careless order in a Vietnamese restaurant. One of my dining companions was a trainee doctor, and she rushed me to the nearby hospital, firing medical jargon at the receptionist so rapidly I tried bending my balloon lips into a smile.
It was a Saturday night and the hospital was busy. As I lay on my bed, as festooned with tubes as the Dalek Emperor, my eyelids slowly deflated, allowing me a clearer view of my ward buddies. Given I was neither handcuffed to my bed nor assisting police with their inquiries, I was in a minority. Another positive was that I could now identify a fishcake. I told myself it wouldn’t happen again. And amusingly, I believed myself.
Let’s jump back to the beginning of the story, roughly 11 kilometres above the sea and much farther from any hospital or, stupidly, Epipen. In the flat, yawning hours of flight, the anticipation of the arrival of food – or at least food’s closest approximation – takes on peculiar dimensions. The moment was as beautiful as I’d imagined, the trolley pulling up beside me, the beaming flight attendant standing behind it. ‘Special meal for you, Mr Jeffrey!’ she announced, like a lottery employee calling a winner. ‘No fish!’
She handed me the box, and upon its lid was a label with my name and the magic word ‘chicken’. It’s possible my happiness was disproportionate, but funny things happen to human beings at high altitude. Our feet swell. Our tastebuds go awry. We dehydrate. We develop a different awareness of the passage of time. We contemplate buying duty free from a trolley. And sometimes, we go cock-a-hoop over a lump of chicken in a box. This was surely what it was like in business class, I thought, pulling back the lid and peering through the modest wisp of steam to my fillet of white flesh upon its bed of rice. Once I’d wrestled my cutlery out of its plastic sheath, I got stuck in.
Its flavour came as a bit of a surprise, but I ploughed on. In my defence, it was airline cuisine, the least easily recognised of the food groups. Doubly so when it’s chicken.
It was only after the second, queer mouthful that the terrible suspicion debuted in my mind and I turned the fillet over. At the first sight of the marks of where bones had once been – fine and unmistakably piscine – I couldn’t help but giggle, a response I sometimes have when things turn completely, unmistakably and irrevocably to shit.
What were the odds of this happening? After all that careful planning, even after checking that little label, this fuster cluck of a chicken was a fish, a creature whose every appendage sounds like the French for ‘the end’.
The time for giggling was short; anaphylaxis does not beat about the bush. Feeling as if I was trapped in one of those comically strange dreams – albeit one in which I was still wearing pants – I slid my tray aside. The itching in my mouth was already giving way to a sensation that felt like I’d gone bobbing for apples but accidentally swallowed a hedgehog. I knelt in the cramped loo and tried getting my fingers in my throat – a supermodel at last! But it was too late. My throat had already swollen so much nothing more was getting in, but nor was it getting out. I was as sealed as my fate was.
I stumbled back towards my seat (in an empty row, as luck had it), prickles sweeping across my skin and all the usual candidates starting to swell.
‘The chicken’, I panted at my flight attendant, ‘was fish.’
(Years later, my big sister sent me an ad she’d torn from a magazine. It depicted a freshly cracked fortune cookie and a slip of a paper that read, ‘That wasn’t chicken.’ She said she thought I’d find it funny.)
My findings successfully presented, I was free to embark on the worst anaphylactic episode of my life. As I sank into a weird, spasmodic darkness, I could hear my heart in my ears. I heard a lot of jittery Korean. I hurt so much I could almost see the pain in flashes of vivid, livid colour. I thought about how Nick Cave had recognised the sinister side of dinner trollies and tried to warn us in ‘The Mercy Seat’.
I thought about my dog waiting for me to come home; Dad always said he had five minutes’ warning of my return because the dog would hear the distant sound of my roughly tuned Celica, go bananas and race to the gate. Now and then I came to and dragged apart my Kardashian eyelids. Each time the crowd of flight attendants hovering around me, wringing their hands, seemed bigger. Later, another passenger would tell me that crew members had come from the cockpit to unhappily behold row 36.
As I drifted, I grew sure this pain – this horrid, skewering pain – would never end. I would never be able to swallow again. I would never stand on terra firma again. Torment and self-pity worked me over like a tag team. I would never again hear a kookaburra, nor a whip bird, and I was sad. I thought about all the kisses I would never have, which struck me as a shame, as I’d spent so much of my life not having them, and now I was and it was magnificent. I thought about never having sex again; it was only a few years since I’d discovered what all the fuss was about, and the thought that it might already be past tense made the darkness more profound. The thought that my last strudel was behind me brought a different gloom. Then I thought about not having to pay off my university student debt, and death lost some of its sting.
Of course, Death was simply window-shopping and, even though time was the only medicine on offer, I was, after several wretched hours, left safely on the shelf.
My last memory of the plane is the pilot. Korean Air was code-sharing with Ansett, and the pilot was Australian and displeased. ‘A report on this will be going to Sydney,’ he informed me. ‘It’s a bloody disgrace.’
I nodded weakly, but to be honest I was ecstatic just to be alive. I was whisked with embarrassed haste through passport control and into Seoul, where I spent my three days hobbling about, eyeing all the tasty treats my throat was too swollen to admit. But things were looking up. I had my cheap hotel room and in it, a huge bath, which I promptly filled and crawled into. I wallowed in more ways than one, but eventually pulled the plug and the water began to gush from a hole in the side of the bath and across the floor, whirlpooling briefly around a drain hole before disappearing. Whoever had bathed last had left a little surprise in the plumbing. As I watched the torrent, a used condom blasted out like a ghostly torpedo, hurtling across the tiles with unerring precision towards that drain hole.
For a brief moment, as it swirled in the sudsy vortex, it felt as if there were two of us in the room – anaphylactic and prophylactic – and then it was gone.
Eventually I finished laughing and thought, could this be God’s way of assuring me I would root again? As I reached for a towel, I felt the most beautiful sense of hope and wonder growing within me. How would He let me know about the strudel?
The Ballad of the Sade * Cafe**
Frank Moorhouse
IT WAS IN the month of February, in the year 1999, while living in Cambridge as The Writer at King’s College. I was inclined one night to forgo High Table and leave the gown and sherry and the scintillating conversation of the best minds of my generation behind me and to lose myself in ‘town’.
I decided that I would not attend the sherry at 7.20 pm and the procession into Hall behind the President of the Table (the most senior fellow present) and, after grace, to be seated and served a beautiful meal by the butlers. And then, after dessert, to retire to the Wine Room for fruit and cheese and port and white wine. And snuff. Of course.
So, I ventured out into ‘town’ with a certain swagger belonging to a chap from Kings – The Writer from King’s – choosing to wear my academic gown for the heck of it.
During my time there I had sometimes snuck off college grounds and visited the Indian restaurants and searched for decadence, without much luck. I was known, of course, at some places by now for my eccentricities regarding the making of the martini and my penchant for lone dining, cross
dressing (as we know, de rigueur at King’s), and sometimes for improper conduct with table attendants.
I had yet to be thrown out. True, I had been moved once or twice because of my over-friendliness to people at other tables. But on the whole, I was tolerated, even if kept under a watchful eye by the staff, and I like to think that I was well admired for my quips and sallies.
On this particular night, therefore, I was nonplussed to find my Indian restaurant declared ‘full’ by the maître d’. As with all rejected diners, I peered at the empty tables and suspected that I was being denied one because of some previous behaviour or because of some aberrance of appearance.
‘Bookings,’ the maître d’ said, ‘all tables booked.’
I had never had to book at this or any other restaurant in Cambridge. However, I left politely and went on to my restaurant of second choice.
Again I was told that ‘all the tables are reserved’.
Outside the restaurant, in the reflection of its window, I examined my dress. I was not in a dress, I had not forgotten to put my socks on and my socks matched (this is not a sartorial requirement at King’s, believe me, although there is a rule about the wearing of brown shoes and when, of which I am uncertain), or to do up my fly (ditto). That my trousers were kept up by my college tie was not out of place in Cambridge. I felt my back to check whether pinned there was a notice saying, ‘Thief and Liar’ or ‘Child Molester’ or ‘Australian’ placed as a ‘jape’ by the ever-playful students who tended to treat me, The Writer, as a butt for all pranks and jests and practical jokes.
At my third restaurant of choice, having met the same response, I confronted the maître d’. ‘Why is it that the restaurants are booked out on this particular Tuesday?’
I did not allow a querulous tone to colour my inquiry.
‘If you will observe the tables of diners already seated you will notice something,’ he said, and patiently gestured at the diners.
I observed. I observed couples.
Only couples.
All with long-stemmed red roses in long-necked vases and candlelit tables.
‘I observe couples dining by candlelight,’ I said inconclusively. ‘I see red roses.’
‘And why would that be the only clientele this particular night?’ the maître d’ said, leading my thinking, respectfully, in the Socratic manner.
I thought of mass marriages by Dr Moon.
I shook my head. ‘Give in,’ I said.
‘Valentine’s Day,’ he said, sympathetically, breaking the news to me with a tenderness not usually characteristic of any maître d’.
‘Valentine’s Day?’
‘Yes, Valentine’s Day.’
He patted my arm. ‘Perhaps a drink on the house – but I am afraid no table tonight, my dear friend,’ he said in this calming voice. It reminded me of the tone of voice of the counselling that I’d had on the half dozen or so post-traumatic stress counselling situations I had experienced since being in Britain.
‘Valentine’s Day,’ I said numbly.
‘Yes.’ He poured me a British ‘large’ drink, which never seems large to me.
‘Valentine’s Day is a commercial fraud,’ I said. ‘It was never celebrated until the last few years.’
‘It started around the year 270,’ the maître d’ said. ‘Chaucer kicked it off,’ he said, pouring me a second drink. In Cambridge even the maître d’ is learned. I saw couple after couple enter his restaurant with red roses, the women in little black dresses and the boys in tight jeans and pressed shirts. Very short black dresses.
‘However,’ he said, leaning close and whispering, ‘in every city there is always one restaurant designated …’ he paused, choosing his words, ‘for people such as you on Valentine’s Day.’
‘Such as me?’
‘Such as you.’
‘Who are such as me?’
‘Well, single people – people without partners.’
‘Or people away from their partners?’ I conjectured.
He obviously did not believe that I was ‘away’ from my partner.
‘I doubt that people away from their partners would wish to eat alone in public on Valentine’s Day,’ the maître d’ said gently. ‘They would be more likely to eat from the refrigerator at home. Say something eggy on toast. Waiting to take a call from their loved one perhaps …’ his voice trailed off protectively.
And, of course, although he didn’t say it, the maître d’ knew that Those Who Are Loved know when it is Valentine’s Day. The others don’t.
‘As I say,’ he said, in his now infuriatingly consoling voice, ‘there are places for you to go.’
He wrote something on a piece of paper, which I took to be the name and address of a restaurant, and handed it to me.
I suggested a compromise. ‘I could eat something here at the bar.’
‘I don’t think that would be a good idea,’ he said. ‘Not a good idea.’
He did not want, I could tell, a single person hanging morbidly and lasciviously around his restaurant on Valentine’s Day.
He moved me towards the door.
He stood there watching as I moved down the street, which seemed now devoid of light. Perhaps he was fearful that I might return and try to gain entry to his restaurant, perhaps by alleging that I had made ‘a reservation for two’. And then saying that my companion had been killed in a car accident and would not be joining me for dinner.
I went then to the address he’d given me in a dark, back lane and found the restaurant. A lane so dark and full of hopeless, sleazy promise that I was surprised I had never been in it before. The restaurant was so dilapidated and out-of-the-way that it was not pretending to be other than a Place of Last Resort for diners not welcome at Venus’s table. Or Place of Last Resort for those seeking whatever.
It was where the unfit (physically and morally) and the unworthy, the unsociable, the unfortunate, the smelly, the unwashed, the profoundly demoralised, gathered to eat – and not only, I suspected, on Valentine’s Day.
The place was so dim I had to feel my way and the maître d’, if that was how he saw himself, with his soiled apron and collapsed chef’s hat, led me to a table. All tables were tiny and designed for one person with room for a book and a small light.
Without asking, he brought me a heavy drink of some dark and fizzing alcoholic beverage that I drank without question. He did not say, ‘Happy Valentine’s Day’ but nor did he say, ‘Unhappy Valentine’s Day.’
There were no flowers in sight. No long-stemmed roses. No music played.
My ears heard the sounds of the restaurant before my eyes became accustomed to the dark. Occasionally a sigh disguised as a clearing of the throat. Occasionally I heard a noise that was a cross between a cry from the soul and a cough.
There was, from time to time, audible sobbing (something I was familiar with from dining alone at Christmas).
I became aware that there were both men and women dining in this sad cafe.
No eye contact was made at any time among the diners, or the table attendants and the diners. All eyes were cast down as victims punished cruelly by the so-called Saint of Love.
I now saw the sadism of Valentine’s Day.
There were no smiles and no one laughed. All read books or The Journal of Scientific Fallacy. Thick books, the books that people who fear running out of reading matter and being left with themselves cart around to restaurants and read on public transport.
They were all concerned to be seen as busy readers.
They made facial movements of agreement or disagreement with the book, some made vigorous marks in the margins or wrote copious notes in old leather-bound notebooks, or they scribbled in the fly leaf and margins or on the blank pages at the back of the book.
I opened my own big book and began to read, and to drink in that way where, without looking at glass or bottle, you reach out and refill the glass. I have no recollection of what I ate.
And then, one by one, we paid our bil
ls and left, walking with that false steadiness and bogus purpose that the unsteady and purposeless always affect.
None of us was under the protection of any saint as we walked out into the dark.
But no. Perhaps we were watched over by other older pagan spirits (from whom the Catholic Church had stolen Valentine’s Day). Those pagan spirits who visited those such as us now and then, on other days of our lives, if not today, and who occasionally, surprisingly, bestow upon us their own strange, aberrant, pagan gifts.
*A pun. Marquis de Sade (1740–1814) published erotic writings that gave rise to the term sadism – enjoyment of cruelty. Not to be confused with Helen Folasade Adu, the English-born torch singer who sings under the name Sade (pronounced by her as ‘Sarday’) and known among her Australian fans as ‘Sadie’.
**With acknowledgment to the Carson McCullers’ novella of the title Ballad of the Sad Cafe.
The Bride Slipped Bare
Larissa Behrendt
THE FEAR I experienced must have been like Gloria Gaynor’s in ‘I Will Survive’, but unlike Gloria’s, my fear didn’t stem from a broken heart but a broken toilet bowl.
I shall tell you more about that in a moment, but I’m here before you as a woman who’s survived her fair share of harrowing, or at least profoundly uncomfortable, experiences. As an Aboriginal woman active in the life of my community, I’ve lived through and survived Aboriginal politics. I’ve worked in the legal profession for over twenty years and experienced the most profound sexism during that time, but I’ve survived the Law.
And I’ve been an academic for most of my professional life. You might think of universities as gentle environments dedicated to the exchange of ideas, but you would be so very, very wrong. Even Henry Kissinger, reflecting on his life, said the most vicious politics he ever encountered were in academia, and not because the stakes were so high but because they were so low. Try telling an academic that they’re going to lose parking space privileges on campus and prepare to see a hissy fit of gigantic proportions. I’ve even survived fourteen consecutive days of negative stories in The Australian, attacking everything from my academic ability to my sex life. For a media organisation that parrots a belief in free speech, it certainly did everything it could to shut me up.
The Full Catastrophe Page 13