‘Well, I’d better get back to it.’ Luke can feel the awkwardness. ‘Leave you two to catch up.’
Luke walks out and they are left looking at each other. A sudden thought hits Alice from left field. If my cousin Jonty did it, you probably know. She wonders where that idea came from and if it is fair to take it seriously – even if it did seem to come from deep in her bones.
‘So, Alice.’ His tone is light and easy, but he doesn’t look at her directly. ‘How are things?’ Alice sees the slight quiver around his top lip and realises that he is shocked to see her, too. A spurt of sadistic pride goes through her. Yes! I do look like her, don’t I? Okay, I’m fatter, but my face is her face. It always was. How you going to deal with that, pretty boy?
‘Good,’ she says curtly. How come he never noticed her three years ago? He’d been eighteen and she fifteen, and yet . . . she hadn’t existed back then. Not for her cousin either, although they were both always polite.
Fifteen years old, shy, awkward and half in love with the cousin she didn’t know and his cute friend, Alice had never even registered on their radar screens. They were too busy with her mother.
‘Watch out for the old man,’ Tom grins suddenly. ‘Bit of a slave driver. You’ve got to call his bluff.’
She gives a tight smile, but she hates him now for being so clever at deflecting the awkwardness. She hates him for his charm. She knows what he’s really trying to say. Hey, all this is a little weird so let’s just lighten up here! The bold sureness of him with his clear eyes and even features, his thin tall body standing loose and easy in jeans and an old jumper, his feet in a pair of scuffed sneakers. So used to getting on with everyone. So used to everyone liking and admiring him. He’d probably never met a girl who didn’t think he was a gift from heaven.
There are a few more uncomfortable moments. She wants to let him know that just because she likes his father – that she appreciates having the job and the rest of it – it doesn’t follow that she has to like him. In fact, the good feelings do not extend to him. Not at all! She doesn’t like him one little bit.
‘Well, I’d better be going,’ he says, backing towards the door.
She nods again and sits down behind the desk.
‘See you around then, Alice.’
‘Yeah, okay.’ She doesn’t look at him as she picks up the phone and pretends to be looking up a number. She can sense him hovering.
‘You been out much since you’ve been back?’
What business is it of yours? ‘Not really,’ she murmurs, wishing that the phone would ring. She has to look up now. He is standing in the doorway, waiting for her to engage with him, to tell him with some small movement or smile that it’s all okay. That after what’s happened they can and definitely should make a fresh start. The past is the past and . . . all the rest of that bullshit.
Well, Tom Mullaney, you’ll be waiting a long time . . . The past is not the past to me. The past is the present and the future as well. So stick that where the sun don’t shine!
‘Wouldn’t be much fun living with your grandmother, I guess?’ He tries his joking tone again. She glowers at him and says nothing, hoping he can sense what’s on her mind. What the hell do you know about my grandmother? She suddenly can’t wait to get with the twins to talk about this. Not only is Jonty back, but his sidekick is as well!
Then another shiver goes through her as she remembers that this guy was questioned by police, too, as Jonty’s friend and as a friend of her mother’s. How can she be sure that he told the police everything?
Alice, what exactly was the nature of this friendship your mother had with Tom Mullaney? It’s the nice female detective back in Alice’s head again, probing gently, as they drink their coffee down on the foreshore.
Alice grew to love Detective Becky Singer in the first few weeks after the murder. She wasn’t sharp or brusque like the male detectives, nor did she ram information and questions down Alice’s throat. She always spoke gently and calmly.
‘Can you tell me anything that they talked about? How often he and your cousin Jonty were there?’
Alice did her best but she couldn’t really because . . . she didn’t understand it. And she was . . . ashamed. How did you explain that your mother, a forty-two-year-old woman, had no friends apart from two eighteen-year-old schoolboys? That in some subtle but fundamental way she had turned away from her only daughter as she’d got closer to them? That she saved her jokes and interesting stories for . . . them. That her maddest giggles – the ones Alice loved best, when she collapsed with laughter over some small incident or crazy thing – were kept for them.
Alice couldn’t admit that. It was too humiliating.
Life on the outside continued as normal. Lillian went to work, continued to cook meals and do the washing, organised dentist appointments, bought Alice clothes and asked about her day. The drinking only began after Alice had gone to bed, but that was normal too. Everything was normal from the outside.
The drinking was another thing Alice never mentioned to anyone after her mother was killed. Her mother drank a lot, but she hid it well. She never drank with other people in a public place for example, and as far as Alice was concerned no one else knew about it. Except those two because they . . . were part of it.
But Alice wasn’t actually sure about any of this. She wasn’t sure about anything. All through her growing up she and her mother had been really close, more like sisters than mother and daughter. They’d stuck by each other through Mad Mal’s bizarre schemes, his rants and rages, and they escaped together. They had been each other’s best friends, until her mother went back to school and those two started coming around regularly. Did Alice tell the detectives any of that? No way! She didn’t understand it herself, and at times she wondered if she’d simply imagined it.
What if this guy standing in the doorway had withheld similar, perhaps more vital, pieces of information? For example, he might be the one person on this earth who knows if her cousin Jonty van der Weihl is innocent . . . or not.
‘Do you remember Josh Peters?’ He is back in the room again, trying harder than ever.
‘No.’ She wants to swat him like a fly now. See him on the ground curling up with pain, screaming for mercy.
‘I thought you might because he went to your school.’ Tom hesitates. ‘He’s my age, but he was at the Catholic school like you. You went to the Catholic school, didn’t you?’
Alice nods sourly. You know I did! In fact, she remembers Josh Peters well, a very short guy, five foot five at the most. When the murder first happened, all her friends kept their wary distance. They sent a joint note and a bunch of flowers, but they didn’t come to see her and they didn’t ring. Alice didn’t blame them. As well as the horror of murder, she knew her grandmother and her huge secluded house were intimidating. Josh was one of the few people to make it up the front steps.
‘Josh and me are going to go out tomorrow night to hear Pete’s Revenge,’ Tom says. ‘Come if you want to.’
Alice has no idea who he means. She does not keep up with bands or modern music generally, so she lets his invitation hang in the air like the pathetic little gesture it is.
‘My grandmother is old,’ she says, still not meeting his eye. ‘I’ve got to get home to her at night.’
‘Okay.’ He shrugs and then flushes, embarrassed that he asked, and she is glad that he feels stupid, really glad that she has hurt him. She wonders if he has any idea about how she used to hate those afternoons. Her mother used to belong to her until her horrible cousin started coming around with this guy. Whether they had anything to do with the murder or not, she associates them with the beginning of the end. As far as Alice is concerned she is entitled to hate both of them.
‘Lousia took it all on board!’
Just home from school, fifteen-year-old Alice stopped outside the back door, her heart sinking. Her mother’s excited tone meant those two boys were there. Who the hell is Lousia?
‘Then life taugh
t her that everything can’t be reduced to a theory.’
‘Love taught her that!’
‘You’re so romantic, Tom!’
‘Why didn’t she just . . . jump ship?’
‘But how could she?’
‘I know it was hard and everything but . . .’
‘She was caught.’
Alice leant up against the wall near the door, feeling her heart beating like a hammer in her chest. Who are they talking about? One day she’d come home and they’d be talking about her, instead of this Louisa, whoever she is. Her mother would be telling them how she longed to jump ship away from her boring sulky plain daughter.
Of course Alice knew this was silly. Her mother loved her, told her all the time, even when Alice was unreasonable and churlish. Even when she told her mother that she wished the boys wouldn’t come around so often. So what is she afraid of? When she does go in she will only find the three of them sitting around the table talking. Not exactly a criminal offence is it? But there will be that distinctive sweet smell of dope in the air and her mother’s face will be flushed and her eyes overly bright and she’ll have her little glass close by. They’ll all straighten up and pull themselves together when they see Alice. She . . . hated that. Because it made her feel as though she was different. Not one of them. Uncool.
‘So, what is he trying to tell us?’ Alice heard the serious inquiring tone in her mother’s voice and hated it.
‘He’s dead.’
This response elicited much laughter and shouting about whether someone is able to come back from the dead. Soon after there was the sound of chairs being scraped back and exclamations about the time.
‘He wrote it to warn us . . .’
‘How could he have known?’
Oh, Alice sighed with relief, they’re only talking about a stupid old book! Oddly enough, it didn’t make her feel easier about those two being there. She had come home dying to show her mother the two essays in her bag both marked A. Mr Kelly had said her standard of work was way above her year level. But what she’d been so excited about only ten minutes before now seemed unimportant.
‘We have our own “hard times”!’ her mother was saying.
‘Not the same.’
The back door suddenly opened and Tom tumbled out. When he turned to shut the door he saw Alice and stumbled backwards in surprise, the expression on his face changing into one of wariness and . . . guilt?
‘Er . . . hello,’ he said. He’d caught her listening and Alice was mortified. She’d never be able to look him in the face again.
‘Hello.’ Alice’s face burned as she watched him head off down the path. We live in hard times too.
That night she goes to bed early. Tells her grandmother that she is tired after her first day at work and has a headache. The housekeeper has made Alice’s favourite dish – a Mexican chilli – as a special treat after her first day, but Alice has to force it down. Meeting Tom Mullaney has made her remember that there was so much she didn’t tell the police.
Those detectives wanted to know every little thing. But it just didn’t seem right to tell. Not after . . . what had happened. If she’d told them certain things they might have judged her mother as cruel or weak or unsuitable as a mother, which was so far from the truth. Lillian was the best mother in the world. Truly the best!
Still it nags at Alice as she pulls the blinds and turns on the light.
Jonty
‘Hey, Buzz! Will I chuck it?’ Jonty holds out the steel bowl full of whipped cream.
His boss, Buzz Critchley, looks up from one of the deep sinks where he is washing the last pan. He pulls the plug and motions Jonty over, wiping one hand on his apron. He dips his finger in the cream and brings it to his mouth, screwing up his face as he tastes it. Without saying anything he picks up a piece of leftover pecan pie from the bench, scoops up more cream with it and proceeds to eat that, too, while switching on the dishwasher with his other hand.
This all makes Jonty smile. The skinny old pig is always eating. He should look like a brick shithouse the way he stacks it away. Instead he reminds Jonty of one of those whippet dogs, lean and sleek and fast. The cream must be fine. Jonty shrugs and heads for the fridge to store it.
‘No, chuck it,’ Buzz calls gruffly. ‘It’s starting to sweat at the edges.’
‘Like me.’ Jonty takes an exaggerated sniff of his own sweaty armpit and Buzz laughs. He knows all about Jonty and he doesn’t care. He reckons that the one thing he’s learnt in life is to take people how you find them. Jonty has heard stories about some of the arseholes running kitchens and figures he got lucky. Buzz doesn’t ask questions and he doesn’t act like he knows everything either. Jonty scrapes the cream into the bin, rinses the bowl and goes back to covering the steel containers with cling wrap.
‘You should be home by now.’ Buzz points to the clock.
‘Yeah, well.’ Jonty puts the containers in the fridge, picks up a cloth and runs it over the smudge on the fridge door. Buzz is right. It’s nearly midnight and the last customer is long gone. Jonty’s hours are five to eleven-thirty, and he’s stuffed. But he doesn’t mind staying on a bit to help out.
Buzz – real name Bernard – is nearly sixty and he’s worked in this place since it opened, near enough to twenty-five years ago. He’s small and wiry, with a weird all-American-boy steel-grey crew cut and a sharp nasal New York accent to match. And he’s gay. But Jonty likes him okay. He’s a good enough guy.
‘You doing anything on the weekend?’ Buzz wants to know from inside the pantry, where he’s probably measuring the distance between the sauce bottle and the flour bin with a tape measure. Jonty had never met a true perfectionist before and finds it kind of intriguing. When he was inside, some of the guards used to get off on making the inmates do things properly. That meant cleaning the floor three times, scraping plates until not a skerrick of food could be seen, even though they were going in the dishwasher – and a whole lot of other stupid shit. But they were just bored, needed some diversion. Buzz’s fussiness is something else. It almost hurts him when a tea towel isn’t folded exactly the right way, or the sink sponge isn’t in the container exactly adjacent to the cleaning liquid.
‘Nah.’ Jonty slams shut the utensil drawer and goes for his coat hanging in a small alcove near the door. ‘Nothing on.’ This will be his first weekend off in six weeks of working this job, and he has no idea what to do with it. Hang about with his mother probably. Jeez! The mind boggles at the thought. He puts on his jacket and looks over as the older man wipes the spotless stainless-steel benches one last time.
Buzz sees Jonty laughing at him and gives one of his crooked, old-man smiles. ‘Okay, I know I’m just a fussy old queen.’
‘You said it, mate.’
The kitchen is big and modern, full of all the state-of-the-art appliances. There are mixers and blenders and grinders and juices, anything you can think of that opens or shuts or whirrs around. The dozen or so lights give the impression of a television studio. It was rebuilt from the ground up a year ago, transforming it from a grotty hard-to-clean dump. Jonty has never been to Buzz’s house, but he’d bet anything that Buzz doesn’t love the kitchen there near as much as he loves this one.
‘You walking home?’ Buzz asks, starting to switch off the lights one by one.
‘Yep.’ Jonty smiles. He walks home every night.
‘I’ll come with you.’
‘Okay.’
Jonty is proud of how well he did in that cooking course. The whole hospitality industry is crying out for guys like him. Good cooks who can do quality food under pressure. He proved himself in the second week he was at Thistles. Buzz was laid off sick with some gay-man’s disease (or that was what the owner told Jonty) and there was no one but Jonty to take over. He’d loved it. He didn’t know Buzz at that stage, so he was hoping the guy might get worse and he could keep the top job. But Buzz was back in a week – he’d only had a flu – and by then Jonty had proved himself. The owner to
ok him aside and told him that he had the talent to do really well.
‘Whatever they say about you, Jonno, you’re smart,’ he’d said. ‘You’re quick and strong and you can keep a dozen things in your head at once. That’s a gift. Stick at it and you could be very successful in this game.’ Jonty went home and told his mum and they both cracked up. Shit, he couldn’t warm up a meat pie when he was at school! His mum had had to poach his eggs in the morning because he always broke them and burnt the toast. You should see him now: a few basic ingredients and a good knife and he’d have a meal for you in seven minutes flat.
The insane hours in the kitchen suit him just fine. Who’d ever want to work nine to five? He likes working half the night and sleeping late. He likes the pressure, too. Figures it keeps him out of trouble.
Buzz and Jonty walk together out through the main part of the restaurant and onto the street. Jonty stops a moment to breathe in the salty air. He loves this moment after work, tired and sweaty, stepping into cold briny air and the roar of the ocean. Buzz turns to lock up and Jonty walks across the narrow road towards the sea to wait for him.
Thistles is built on a steep cliff. It’s too dark now to see all the jagged rocks that cascade into the raging water below, but in the daytime . . . it’s green and spumy-wild. People come from all over to eat the fancy food while they watch the sea crashing against the rocks below.
One of the local coppers told Jonty that eight people jumped from this point last year. Eight! Instant death. And that constituted a good year, the lowest number in a decade. The year before there had been eleven. He told Jonty it was a favourite spot, only beaten for numbers by the West Gate Bridge. He’d been almost proud when he said that, and Jonty had found it funny. Hearing about the council’s proposal to put up a high fence to discourage people from using the favourite spot had him laughing harder. If you want to neck yourself, you do it. He should know, he’s thought about it. Who hasn’t? Ended up thinking that there had to be an easier way to go than jumping.
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