by Susan Duncan
Every night for a week before the big day I wake up in a cold panic. The nightmares are all the same. Not enough food. Prepare it for the wrong date. Can’t find the plates. A couple of days before the guests are due, I dream about returning home from the supermarket to find crowds of people hanging around, bored, hungry and cranky. All I have is four small, raw chickens. I turn on the oven but it won’t heat up. I’m screaming no, no, no when Bob wakes me. I’m wet with sweat. Breathless.
‘This lunch isn’t worrying you, is it?’ he asks, frowning with concern.
‘Nah! Hot flush, that’s all.’
I buy more and more food. Bob shakes his head without saying a word. He offers to help but my mind swizzles in increasingly confused circles. I forget why I thought I needed so much parsley. And what’s the chutney for again? The pantry is stacked with old jam jars full of it. Quadrupled the recipe.
The day before the lunch I halve fifty spatchcocks to marinate in lime zest, harissa, crushed garlic and salt flakes. It takes four hours to make one hundred fat veal meatballs stuffed with camembert, rolled in breadcrumbs and oven-roasted. Sprigs of fresh rosemary and crushed garlic are layered between delicate lamb cutlets to be barbecued on the day. I slow-roast beetroot and carrots in honey to serve cold. Spend the entire afternoon char-grilling vegetables on the barbecue – sweet potatoes, red capsicums, zucchini sprinkled with chopped garlic, mushrooms with a whiff of chili – until Lovett Bay smells like a restaurant and everyone wants to know what’s going on.
‘A party?’ the boys in the boatshed ask hopefully.
‘Nope. A lunch. A tour group. We’re having it up the hill.’
Their faces sag with disappointment.
‘There’ll be leftovers,’ I add, to cheer them up.
The fridge bursts with neatly packed and labelled containers, but the stainless steel bowls I bought hoping they would magically turn me into a professional chef are still stacked, unused, on the kitchen table. I can’t decide if that is a good or bad sign.
Dessert will be easy, I tell myself before turning out the bedroom light. Lemon cakes, the kind you make in a food processor in a few minutes. They never fail. As I pull over the bedcovers, the smell of garlic and onions fills the air. From my hands. It takes about three days to scrub it away.
At four am before it’s light, I creep out of bed. Count forty-five eggs, soften five and a half pounds of butter in the microwave and zest twenty lemons to make five cakes, doubling the quantities with each one. Twenty slices to every cake. It takes twice as much time as I allotted, time that pounces forward in half-hour increments instead of minutes. My stomach is roiling with anxiety.
By the time Lisa arrives with one hundred golden-crusted bite-size meat pies, the cakes are lined up. Only one has sunk a little alarmingly in the middle, pulled out of the oven before it was cooked. Impatience. A lifelong affliction, like plunging in without thinking about the details – or possible consequences.
‘We can save that cake for last,’ I tell Lisa when she looks at it uncertainly. ‘Only use it if we have to.’
‘Tell me again why you wanted the pies,’ she asks, looking at the kitchen sink, which is head-high with dishes.
‘Melbourne Cup Day tradition,’ I explain. As I say it, I remember we always had chicken sandwiches on Cup Day. I’ve got it mixed up. Meat pies go with the football. Bugger. I break out in a wave of hot flushes, spin a few times.
‘You alright? Think you might do well with a cuppa,’ Lisa suggests, putting on the kettle.
‘Feel a bit stressed,’ I confess. ‘Everything changes when people are paying for something. What if it all goes wrong?’
‘Well, we fix it. I mean, what’s the panic? Is anyone going to die?’
I hear my own words coming back at me: If it’s not life threatening, don’t sweat it. That’s how I try to live. But I forget. ‘No, of course not,’ I smile.
Bob comes in for a cuppa. The knees of his faded jeans are caked with dirt. He’s been kneeling somewhere, fixing something. He offers to chop the parsley lying in a deep green mound on the kitchen bench. I hand it to him with a grateful sigh. What’s it for again? Then I remember he hasn’t had breakfast. I’m about to ask him what he’d like, but he’s already putting two slices of bread in the toaster.
At nine o’clock, Bob and Lisa carry the food containers past the boatshed to Bob’s rusty old ute parked at the bottom of the hill. The boys put in their orders for leftovers: spatchcocks and lemon cake. There’s no mention of vegetables.
At Tarrangaua, Caro, Fleury and Marie set the tables on the verandah, arrange flowers and fold crisp white napkins. We crank up the music. Tony Joe White belts out ‘Polk Salad Annie’, a song about a poor girl who lives on weeds from the riverbanks. I squirm. The largesse of lunch seems suddenly indecent.
A breeze floats along the verandah like a cool spirit. Splendid yachts, a derelict working boat with a sexy, svelte hull, motor cruisers, old ferries and boats wreathed in grunge and bird shit rock on green waters. The window of a homemade houseboat we call the Fruit Box, which never moves off its mooring, winks in the light. Tree tops foam like gold tipped waves. Who cares about the food? To be here is privilege enough.
Fleury organises water jugs, plates and servers, moves tables to strategic positions to serve food and drinks. Lisa sets up the kitchen like an army canteen while Marie and Caro polish cutlery borrowed from every nearby household, iron out creases in the tablecloths, sweep gum leaves that have flown in on the wind like butterflies.
Friends Geoff and Jacqui arrive with a basket of glorious roses from their mountain garden. Marie arranges them in vases on tables, cupboards, the old pianola, the mantelpiece. It feels like the house has woken from a long, deep sleep and has dressed for the occasion in its best party clothes.
‘Ferry’s coming,’ shouts Lisa from the verandah.
‘Here, Caro, you cook the asparagus. You do it better than anyone else.’ I shove a large box at her. ‘It’s got me stumped. There’s too much.’
Caro’s brought her mother’s old asparagus cooker, which is big enough for a couple of bunches. She laughs. ‘This won’t do it!’ she says. ‘What we need is a huge saucepan.’
She climbs a ladder and passes down a gigantic stockpot from the top shelf of the pantry. ‘Almost big enough,’ she says. Then she lifts the box onto the bench and reaches in to begin snapping the ends off each spear. ‘We’ll tie them in lots of small bundles and stand them up,’ she announces.
‘Go, girl!’
Bob grabs the tongs and lays the naked little spatchcocks on the grill in orderly lines, tucking in their wings and legs tidily. Fleury’s husband, Stewart, who’s dropped by out of curiosity, gets ready to barbecue the lamb cutlets, so small and tender they’re barely more than a bite each. Lisa arranges the dreaded meatballs on a large platter, cutting them in half.
‘No-one’s gonna eat a whole one, Susan,’ she says. ‘They’re bigger than footballs!’
Marie and Lisa pour cool water, soft drinks or wine, as guests arrive, offer a bite-size pie. ‘Melbourne Cup tradition,’ Lisa explains, smiling. I decided not to confuse her with the truth.
Mid-afternoon, Fleury organises a sweep, which has the Americans, Brits, French, German and Italian dames flummoxed. They understand winning, though, and when the race begins, the budgie yabber of a boozy lunch hushes.
I stand back and raise a glass to my brother, a larrikin gambler who graced racetracks with Beau Brummel elegance, in a silent toast. As I will at this time every year. Wish you were here. Wish we were dressed to the max to hit the Spring Racing Carnival, our race books marked up and every horse a lay-down misère winner. Then I turn away from the television before the race ends. Too many tears. Too many memories. Better keep busy. Dirty plates are stacked from one end of the kitchen to the other. If my mother were around, she’d say leave them! I’ve always wondered how she thinks they’ll get done. By magic? I turn on the tap and fill the sink. If my mother has a secret trick, I
wish she’d pass it on.
An hour later, guests tackle the uneven sandstone pathway down to the ferry. Too late, I remember the wobbly stone on the bottom step at the fork. Meant to ask Bob to fix it.
‘Lisa! Anyone really pissed?’ I call out. She’s clearing tables on the verandah.
‘Just a couple,’ she replies.
‘Shit! We’d better help them on the steps.’
‘Wouldn’t worry,’ she says. ‘If they’re pissed they won’t hurt themselves. I’d be more concerned about the sober ones.’
And we laugh and laugh.
‘Doesn’t matter how many precautions you take,’ Lisa adds, coming in with a tray load of coffee cups, ‘if there’s going to be a bolt out of the blue, nothing you can do will stop it.’
We line up on the verandah waving goodbye as the ferry slides past. Pittwater looks sublime. I feel possessive and protective.
‘Well,’ says Lisa, hands on her hips, her curly blonde hair looking only slightly frizzy, ‘that wasn’t too awful. But were you expecting a few more people?’ She looks at the leftovers.
‘Thought I’d make extra so everyone could take some home,’ I lie. Bob’s about to tell the truth but my black look stops him.
‘So what was all the parsley for?’ he asks.
‘Decoration.’ It’s another lie. I remembered far too late that it was supposed to go in the meatballs.
When we’ve shared the leftovers amongst the helpers, the neighbours and the boys in the boatshed, finished the dishes, mopped the floors and re-settled the house into its customary solitary state, Bob and I wander home a little unsteadily along Lover’s Lane to the Tin Shed by the light of a torch. An owl hoots, over and over. Boo-boo. Boo-boo. It’s a lonely, mournful sound. Once it would have made me cry.
I tell Bob the truth about the parsley when we’re in bed. Lying can get to be a habit – and there’s no point. Trust is a very thin thread.
‘House looked good, though, don’t you think? Like she’d fluffed for the day?’ I say in the darkness.
Bob grunts. Rolls over to wrap his arms around me. I squeeze tightly against him. Until a dreaded hot flush pounds in. He wipes the sweat from under my eyes with the ball of his thumb. Slides across the bed so I can throw off the blankets. Within a minute, his breathing falls into the steady rhythm of sleep. As I lie there reliving the day in my mind, I begin to think about the pale house on the high rough hill slightly differently.
It feels like only a minute or two has gone by between the Melbourne Cup lunch and Christmas Day. When I was a kid, a withered old bloke with missing teeth and a turtle head used to tell me, ‘Time speeds up as you get older.’ He ran the dusty corner store in the country town outside Melbourne where my parents owned a pub. Every visiting Sunday, when I was allowed out of boarding school – after church and back before dinner – I’d swing open the creaky door with its busted flywire and step into the gloom to buy two shillings worth of black cats.
He was a frugal old codger who’d survived the Depression and only turned on the electric lights after sunset.
‘Youth is wasted on the young,’ he’d despair, as he separated four black cats for each penny with knotted, arthritic fingers. He had jelly beans, jubes, freckles and mints in glass jars on the pitted counter. Black and white striped humbugs and red, green and gold traffic lights wrapped in clear paper. But the chewy black cats with a powerful taste of aniseed were my favourites.
I didn’t believe him about speeding time. I was not even a teenager and the days seemed to drizzle between one school holiday and the next. Now I am in my fifties, I understand what he meant. About youth being wasted on the young, as well.
This first Christmas Day since Bob and I married, the weather is nervy. Winds swirl indecisively, cool from the south for a moment, then blasting hot from the west. Boats swivel on their moorings, confused. White caps foam and froth. We are edgy, too. It is the bushfire season and fires are wreaking havoc north and south of us, destroying homes, livestock, land and lives. It is calamitous. All night a westerly wind flicked ash and soot our way, fogging the sky, thickening the air. The smell of roasted eucalyptus seeped into our hair, our skin. Now it hangs off us like a spare set of clothing. Our little bay has escaped so far, but for how long?
We are planning to have lunch on the verandah at Tarrangaua instead of at home in the Tin Shed. A salute to the past. Another easing of feeling that I have somehow stolen another woman’s life and I have no right to be standing in her kitchen. The usual suspects, as my mother always refers to them, are coming for roast turkey and pudding. Bomber and Bea, tanned almost black from slogging around the waterways on their boot-shaped emerald green barge, The Trump, fixing moorings. Marty, my brother-in-law from my first marriage, and his beautiful partner, Witch. The blind Buddhist nun, Adrienne Howley, whom we all met when she kindly visited Tarrangaua to talk to Barbara who hadn’t much longer to live. Barbara had wanted to know more about the poet. The nun had nursed Mackellar for nearly eleven years and could answer most of her questions.
And, of course, my mother, Esther, is with us, as she is every year. Already Bob and I know she is not keen on the nun – feels her turf is threatened and she might have to battle for the single-minded attention she is used to. Adrienne, also in her eighties, is wise enough to stay out of her way, which isn’t hard because we have given her a room at Tarrangaua. She sits, each morning, as still as a statue in a cane chair on the verandah, her hands folded in her lap. Wearing the deep maroon robes of a Tibetan nun. At peace.
In the Tin Shed, down the hill, my mother rises, as she’s done for as long as I can remember, before dawn. I hear her footsteps going to and from the bathroom. The loo flushing. The kettle boiling. The smell of toast cooking and the acrid scent of instant coffee.
‘I don’t disturb you, do I?’ she asks.
‘No, not at all,’ I fib every time. Because I know it is impossible for her to change her habits.
It is a small group gathering for Christmas lunch this year. Suzi and Lulu, the daughters of my first husband, Paul, are celebrating with their father’s side of the family. Bob’s son, Scott, can’t get time off from his job in Pittsburgh, in the US, where he’s a chemical engineer. Bob’s three daughters, Kelly, Meg and Nicole, are based in Victoria. Kelly, a nurse, is on duty over Christmas and New Year. Meg, an engineer like her father, plans to drive from Melbourne on Boxing Day. Nicole, with two young children, finds it less stressful to spend Christmas at home.
Pia, a great friend and long-time Christmas stalwart, refused to budge from her new northern New South Wales paradise and who could blame her? ‘I’m having a sandwich on the beach with anyone who wants to join me,’ she explained.
Stewart and Fleury and their two daughters will come for pudding, bringing their guests – a tradition since I moved to Pittwater. And any neighbour who feels like floating in for a drink, or just to escape their own mayhem, is welcome.
Five minutes after we all sit at the table to begin lunch a hot gust explodes down Salvation Creek, blasting the nun’s fresh prawns down the length of the verandah. We watch, open-mouthed. The prawns look alive, like a dream sequence in a B-grade movie. Then the phone rings. Somehow we know it isn’t going to be a distant friend calling to exchange greetings.
‘Akuna Bay is on fire,’ says a neighbour. ‘You’d better prepare.’
Akuna Bay, on Coal and Candle Creek, is in the heart of the Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park. When the wind blows from the west Lovett Bay always takes a direct hit. That’s the course it blew in 1994, when all the houses in our little enclave burned to the ground. Except Tarrangaua.
‘It is a strange house, that one,’ an old-time resident told me a while after I moved here. ‘It’s only ever caught fire once. In the 1960s, in a small section of the north east corner, and it was easily put out with barely any damage done. No other bush fire has come near it. And there have been plenty! Seems to have a spirit protecting it. Or something.’ I think of his words as smoke
hazes the sky behind the hills and escarpments, hoping they will be true again.
‘Better get the pumps ready,’ Bob says, pushing back his chair.
‘Better get the leaves off your roof,’ Bomber replies, standing up.
‘Better rake the lawn and sweep the leaf litter away from around the house,’ Bea adds, smoothing her dress over a stomach iron hard with muscle.
‘What can I do?’ asks the nun.
‘Better say a prayer,’ I suggest.
‘What about me?’ Marty asks.
‘You’d better direct operations, Marty. Save those tired old knees of yours in case we have to make a dash for it.’ I look at Witch, dark-eyed, tanned and dressed in pure white linen. Her soft, city hands wave in query.
‘Better start making sandwiches, Witch. Think the grand repast has turned into a picnic. Oh, and make a few – if the fire gets here, we’ll have hungry fireys everywhere.’
My mother looks up from her plate. Sighs. The oysters will have to wait. ‘I’d better have a whisky,’ she says, to veil the inadequacy of old age.
Bomber changes into a pair of Bob’s paint-stained shorts and a tatty shirt, jams his feet into a too-small pair of battered Dunlop tennis shoes. He grabs a ladder and broom and climbs to the roof, sweeping from a 30-degree angle, treading carefully and trying not to crack the terracotta tiles. Leaves drop from gutters and valleys in the roof line, falling in avalanches that lie three inches deep. Bea and I fill large plastic garbage bags with leaf litter. The wind rockets. Trees bend. Our throats grow hoarse with smoke.
Bob unrolls hundreds of metres of hose from house to shore. It lies on the track like a fat blue snake with a glittering nozzle head. He sets up a pump on the pontoon to pull water from the bay. The pump is so powerful it would empty the rainwater tanks in minutes.