The Pretty Delicious Cafe

by Danielle Hawkins

  I called Mike one Sunday evening, and Dad answered the phone. In response to my cheery small talk he told me he’d put his back out, the lamb schedule at the works was plummeting to its doom and he hadn’t heard from Rob for months.

  ‘Why don’t you ring him, then?’ I suggested. I’m quite brave when there are four hundred or so kilometres between Dad and me; it’s just face to face that I shrivel. ‘Is Mike home?’

  There was a grunt, a clatter, a muffled shout of ‘Michael!’ and then a long wait before Mike picked up the phone.

  ‘Hello?’ he said.

  ‘Hi, Mike, it’s Lia.’

  ‘Hey, blister. How’s things?’

  ‘Very good,’ I said. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Oh, fine. How’s the wedding planning going?’

  ‘Lurching from crisis to crisis,’ I said. ‘But I think that’s perfectly normal for weddings. Have you had any rain?’

  We talked about the weather and the restaurant industry for a while, and then I said, ‘Mike, have you talked to Mum lately?’

  ‘Not for a couple of weeks, probably,’ he said. ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m a bit worried about her.’

  ‘Why? What’s wrong?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘She’s just . . . flat. She won’t tell me what the trouble is but I thought maybe she’d talk to you.’

  ‘To me?’ Mike said, sounding startled.

  ‘Well, I’m a mere daughter, but you’re a friend.’

  ‘What about what’s-his-face with the ponytail? That American bloke.’

  ‘Hugh? She wouldn’t talk to him.’

  ‘Wouldn’t she?’

  ‘No. Poor man, he thinks she’s lovely, and she won’t have a bar of it.’

  ‘Huh,’ said Mike. Then, ‘Lia, surely that’s her decision.’

  ‘I know it is,’ I said impatiently. ‘But I don’t think it’s that she doesn’t like him; she wouldn’t give anyone a chance. And – and I don’t want to sit by and watch her set herself up for a sad and lonely old age without trying to do something about it.’

  The pause following this little speech stretched out long enough for me to reflect on the fact that my brother was not only single and in his forties, but that he lived with his father in a remote and sparsely populated valley an hour from the nearest town. ‘I don’t mean all single people are miserable or anything,’ I hurried on. ‘It’s a perfectly good lifestyle choice –’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Mike.

  ‘But –’

  ‘You don’t think you should be stopping before you dig yourself a deeper hole?’

  ‘Almost certainly. But what I was trying and failing to say is that I think Mum’s single because she’s scared of letting anyone close, not because she’s happier by herself.’

  ‘Well, maybe,’ he said.

  ‘I might have completely the wrong end of the stick. But – would you give her a ring some time?’

  ‘I don’t really think my input’s going to be very useful,’ he said. ‘But of course I’ll ring her. So, what’s that useless twin of yours up to?’

  * * *

  It was after eight by the time I got to Jed’s, where I found him lying underneath a boat trailer on the front lawn.

  ‘Evening,’ I said, nudging his bare foot with mine.

  ‘Hey. Won’t be a minute. Could you pass me that grease gun?’

  I did, and then sat down on the grass beside him. It was a warm, sleepy sort of evening, the peace accentuated rather than broken by the noise of occasional passing cars and someone playing heavy metal way off down the street. The west-facing windows flanking the front door flashed gold in the evening sunlight and a lone seagull circled lazily overhead.

  After a few minutes Jed wriggled out from under the trailer, sat up and kissed me. ‘Hello,’ he said.

  Conscious of an itchy, uncomfortable sensation between my shoulder blades, I looked quickly around. A red car was vanishing down the street – Isaac’s, perhaps.

  ‘What is it?’ Jed asked.

  ‘Nothing. I think Isaac just went past, that’s all.’

  He smiled. ‘Could you feel him giving us the stink eye?’

  ‘Yeah, I think so,’ I said, sighing.

  ‘Never mind,’ he said, giving my leg a comforting rub. ‘He’ll get over it. Have a good day?’

  I shivered. ‘Yes, fine. How was Tracey?’ He and Craig had planned to visit her in hospital that afternoon.

  ‘Better. Her parents were there too, so that was nice for Craig.’

  I nodded, leaning back on my wrists. Jed plucked a paspalum stalk and began folding it into a zigzag, and I watched him with growing concern, having learnt by now that he liked to worry with his hands occupied.

  ‘They’re thinking they’ll discharge her in another two weeks,’ he said eventually.

  I frowned. ‘To where?’

  ‘She’s going to stay with her parents for a while.’

  ‘But her dad’s not very well, is he?’

  ‘No. He’s got kidney failure. He’s doing okay, but he needs dialysis three times a week.’

  ‘So you’re leaving in two weeks,’ I said blankly.

  ‘No,’ he said, not looking at me. He reached the tip of his grass stalk, dropped it and picked another one.

  ‘When, then?’

  ‘Lia, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Maybe not at all. Apparently it’s all going to be different this time.’

  ‘But you don’t think it will be.’

  He sighed and moved onto grass stalk number three. ‘I’m slightly sceptical. I’ve heard all this before.’

  ‘Don’t they have any concerns about discharging her so soon, after what happened last time they decided she’d be okay with her parents?’

  ‘Well, in their defence, mania doesn’t normally escalate that fast,’ he said. ‘The main reason things turned to custard was that she smoked a whole lot of P. And she didn’t have any history of taking drugs.’

  ‘And now she does, and her dealer lives in Thames.’

  He dropped his grass stalk, then, and looked at me. ‘If you’ve got some kind of bad feeling about it, now would be the time to say so.’

  ‘I haven’t got that kind of bad feeling,’ I snapped. ‘I just don’t want you to leave.’

  There was a short silence.

  ‘I don’t want to leave either,’ he said quietly.

  I bit my lip. ‘Sorry.’

  He reached out a hand, and I took it. ‘Look, if we do go back to Thames, it won’t be forever,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to devote the rest of my life to helping Tracey get back on her feet.’

  Maybe, I thought bleakly. He’d miss me, if he left, but you get over missing people. Time heals whether you want it to or not, and after a few months I doubted he’d be keen to uproot Craig yet again. And it wasn’t fair to expect him to – after all, I wasn’t considering moving across the country for him. Not really; the fantasies of leaving that develop on your thirty-second consecutive thirteen-hour working day don’t count.

  I sighed and squeezed his hand. ‘I brought you some carrot cake.’

  ‘With cream cheese icing?’

  ‘Is the Pope a Catholic?’

  He leant over and kissed me. ‘Go on in,’ he said. ‘I’ll just push this trailer into the garage.’

  Letting myself in through the living room sliding door, I heard the breathless, gulping sobs of a child who’s been crying unheard for quite a long time. Horrified, I dropped my handbag on the table and ran down the hall to Craig’s bedroom. The curtains were drawn and the room looked very dark, coming in from the sunlight.

  ‘Hey,’ I said, going to the side of his bed. ‘Craig, sweetie, it’s okay. What’s wrong?’

  Craig gasped something completely unintelligible, but my eyes had adjusted enough by then to see that he’d been profusely, impressively sick, all over himself and his bedclothes.

  ‘Oh, sausage. Hop up, and I’ll help you take off your PJs. Dad’s just coming.’
/>   ‘I frowed up,’ Craig wailed, swinging his feet out of bed.

  I turned the light on and surveyed the scene with some dismay. ‘You sure did. It doesn’t matter, we’ll fix it.’

  In response he convulsed and leant forwards over the carpet. I leapt towards him, hands cupped beneath his mouth in a heroic, though ill-considered, attempt at damage control.

  ‘That’s above and beyond the call of duty, isn’t it?’ said Jed from the doorway.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, hastening unhappily towards the bathroom with my hands full of warm sick.

  While Jed stripped Craig and got him into the shower, I started changing the bed. ‘I’ll do that,’ he said, coming back in. ‘Go out into the lounge; I’ll be there soon.’

  ‘No, it’s fine.’

  He’d probably have stayed to argue, but a cry of ‘Dad-deee!’ sent him hastening back down the hall.

  It was half an hour before he reappeared.

  ‘Is he asleep?’ I asked, putting down my book.

  ‘Yep. Poor little guy. Cup of tea?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  He went around the corner into the kitchen, returning several minutes later with two mugs in one hand and a plate of carrot cake in the other. He handed me a mug, put the other down on the table, sat down beside me on the sofa, leant forwards to cut himself a generous wedge of cake – and stopped. He laid down the knife, got slowly and carefully to his feet and bolted back down the hall.

  Throwing up isn’t the sort of thing someone else can help with, so I stayed where I was, sipping my tea. But after a little while I realised that the retching noises were punctuated by sobs. Getting up, I went down the hall to find Jed vomiting into the toilet with a force and intensity I had never seen paralleled, while Craig stood crying in his bedroom doorway.

  Whatever bug the two of them had picked up, it was a cracker. Craig was sick twice more; once, when I was late with the bowl, across his bed. I changed it again and tucked him back in, stroking the damp hair back off his forehead.

  ‘Can you say me a poem?’ he asked.

  ‘Um,’ I said. ‘Okay. D’you know the one about peas?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘My granddad used to say it to my brother and me. “I eat my peas with honey; I’ve done it all my life. It makes the peas taste funny but it sticks them to the knife.”’

  Craig smiled wanly. ‘Say another one.’

  ‘I can’t remember any more off by heart . . . Hang on.’ Aided by Google and my cell phone, I recited ‘My Shadow’, ‘The Man from Ironbark’ and, finally, ‘Not Understood’, which is about a mile above any preschooler’s head but has a lovely, stately rhythm that’s perfect for falling asleep to.

  ‘’Nother one,’ Craig whispered as I finished.

  ‘Not tonight. My phone’s almost out of battery. And you need to go to sleep now; it’s the middle of the night.’

  ‘Can you get Dad to come and snuggle me up?’

  ‘I’ll go and ask him,’ I said, standing up. ‘Goodnight, sausage.’

  ‘Come in,’ said Jed hoarsely when I tapped on the bathroom door. I opened it and saw him sitting on the floor beside the toilet with his back against the wall, knees up and forehead resting on his folded arms.

  ‘How’re you doing?’ I asked.

  ‘Mint,’ he said, not lifting his head.

  ‘Craig’s wondering if you can go and see him.’

  ‘I don’t think standing up’s a plan.’

  ‘I’ll tell him,’ I said, retreating.

  Craig, however, had fallen asleep during my twenty-second absence.

  I put my head back around the bathroom door. ‘Scrap that; he’s asleep.’

  ‘Good,’ said Jed, looking up. His face was grey, with a faint, unhealthy sheen. ‘Sorry. Not much of a night for you.’

  ‘Much worse for you,’ I pointed out. ‘Is it the bug from hell or something you ate, d’you reckon?’

  ‘Petrol station sushi, I think. Craig only had a little bit, thank Christ. Why don’t you go home and get some sleep?’

  I shook my head. ‘Craig might be sick again, and you’re in no shape to look after him.’

  ‘I’ll be fine. Go on.’

  ‘Would you please stop being so bloody self-sufficient?’ I said, exasperated. ‘Of course I want to stay and help. That’s what girlfriends do.’

  ‘Is it? I’m out of the loop. But you should go; you’ve got work in the morning.’

  ‘Why the sudden concern? We’ve had barely any sleep for weeks.’

  He smiled suddenly. ‘It’s just not that sexy listening to someone spew.’

  ‘You do realise it’d take quite a lot more than that to put me off, don’t you?’ I said, smiling back.

  And then the next wave of nausea caught up with him and he bent hurriedly over the toilet bowl, cutting the subject abruptly and unromantically short.

  Chapter 24

  I spent the night on the sofa, thinking that if I slept in Jed’s bed he wouldn’t, for fear of disturbing me. Just before six, feeling both stiff and unrested, I got up and tiptoed down the hall to check on the sufferers. They were both asleep and it seemed criminal to wake them, so I collected my handbag from the table, wrote See you later x on the edge of a bit of newspaper with Craig’s orange crayon, and let myself quietly out of the house into the fresh light of early morning.

  It was a glorious day. Half a dozen seagulls were applying themselves to next-door’s rubbish bag, left on the grass verge, the sky was a clear, pale blue and the air smelt of salt. I’d have liked an early-morning swim, but sadly I was wearing a black lace, boyfriend-impressing G-string that could not, under any circumstances, pass as a bikini bottom. With a small, regretful sigh I unlocked the car and drove home up the hill.

  My mind, as I parked the car, closed the garage roller door and started for the house, was focused entirely on custard squares. I’d seen a picture in a cookbook of a round version, assembled in a ring tin and then served in wedges, like cake. But why stop there? You could do as many layers of pastry and custard as you liked – and you could alternate custard layers with cream – or lemon honey – or both . . .

  Passionfruit would be nice, too, I thought, standing up on tiptoe to fetch the kitchen door key from the top of the doorframe. The kitchen smelt of cinnamon and lilies from a bunch Mum had brought us the day before. It was a lovely scent, if a trifle overpowering, and there was no obvious reason for it to trigger a creeping sensation of dread. I stopped just inside the door and bit my lip, wondering what was wrong.

  There was a déjà vu flavour to the feeling – groping for it, I found an image of leaf shadows dancing on a sunlit wall. Mum’s kitchen – yes, that was it. Just before Christmas, with the smells of lilies and spice mingling in the warm air and that same irrational terror. But nothing scary happened, I thought, puzzled. Unless it’s going to happen now . . .

  The dread rose and thickened as I stood there, and all at once, like a rabbit in a spotlight beam, I lost my nerve and bolted. I ran straight back out the kitchen door, down the porch steps and across the gravel to the garage. Grabbing the bottom of the roller door I heaved it back up. The metal screeched as it moved – it always screeched; it was old and rusty – but suddenly it sounded like something out of a horror movie. Get in the car. Go to Jed’s. No, Mum’s, he’s sick – it doesn’t matter, just GO . . . My hand was on the car door handle when someone grabbed me around the middle.

  I screamed like a fire siren.

  ‘Shut the fuck up!’ Isaac spat into my ear.

  I lashed out at him, crazy with fear, kicking his shins and twisting in his arms to scratch him, pull his hair, go for his eyes – anything. He recoiled slightly, disconcerted by the ferocity of my attack, and then shoved me back, hard, against the garage wall. The wall was unclad on the inside, and my head slammed back against a stud with a crack that left me dizzy with pain. I cried out again, and his hands came up around my throat.

  ‘Shut up, bitch.’

  I felt hi
s hands grating against the cartilage of my trachea and his fingertips digging agonisingly into the muscles below my ears. It hurt horribly, and I couldn’t breathe. My vision fizzed and wavered. Rob, I thought, frantic with terror. Rob! Help! Oh, God, please –

  ‘You disgusting little slut,’ Isaac was saying, shaking me by the throat. ‘You make me sick. I’ve seen you with him, like fucking animals, you filthy little –’ There was more, but the words were drowned out by the frantic pounding of blood in my ears. I remember watching him shout at me, like TV with the sound turned off, before his face slid away into the dark.

  * * *

  The smell was the first thing I noticed as I came around; musty, like damp, unaired washing. The second thing was the pain. I had a pounding headache and my throat was raw and swollen. It was pitch-dark and noisy, and we were moving. I pushed myself shakily up on one elbow, hit my head on something hard and subsided, gasping with pain. The hand I put to the back of my head met a mat of sticky, congealing blood and hair.

  I’m in the boot of a car, I thought. Then, fear prickling through the pain and nausea, God, where’s he taking me? Slowly, grimly, I began to feel around in the dark, looking for something I could use as a weapon. A couple of reusable shopping bags, a set of jumper leads – a potential garrotte, if I could rip off the rubber covering the wires with my teeth? – an orphaned canvas sneaker I’d thought I’d lost about a year ago . . . This was the boot of my car. What the hell was he going to do? Drive it off a cliff with me inside it? Did he think he’d killed me? Would he kill me when he realised he hadn’t?

  Spurred on by the beginnings of panic I reached out, groping for an internal catch to the door of the boot. I found the join where the boot closed easily enough, but it was a straight, continuous crack and I couldn’t get my fingertips underneath it. But perhaps if I had a screwdriver or something . . . What about the tyre-changing kit?

  The kit lived underneath the spare tyre, which sat in a well beneath me, covered with nylon carpet and screwed down with two big wing nuts on long bolts that would be reasonable weapons in their own right if I could get them free.