Fava Beans For Breakfast

by Suzanne Salem

  Instead, he focused his attentions on the purple wallpapered wall that had recently been added to his office. At the moment, Goldie’s head was interrupting the flow of a teardrop-shaped swirl. Paisley, it was called. He concentrated on the pattern until he felt the heat dissipate from his body.

  ‘I don’t expect you to get back to me right now. If you have any questions, you can call Bruce. All communication from now on has to be through him.’ She rummaged through her handbag and handed Tom a business card.

  He took the card from her without looking at it.

  ‘Poor Uncle Frank,’ tutted Tom. ‘If your little caper succeeds with me as the new and proud owner of that land … well, geez, I reckon that would pretty much finish him off. You must be counting on a pretty penny when his toes eventually curl up.’

  She rose from her seat and smiled tensely, her lips full of guile, her body as alert as a ferret. ‘Like I said before, I have my reasons. Private reasons. Obviously, Nayeema need never know about this conversation.’

  ‘Obviously.’

  ‘Well, then. Toodles,’ she said breezily, and almost skipped out of his office.

  Tom waited for the jingle from her anklet bells to become fainter before he rose from behind his desk and walked with calm, even strides across the room to the door and slammed it shut with the flat of his palm, like a smack. His head felt swollen with heat and Goldie’s words. She was treacherous.

  He stared out of the window where the afternoon shadows were lengthening on the street. This was the time for catching prey: when light and shadow played tricks, where the strong turned on the weak.

  CHAPTER TWENTY - SIX

  Silence. Not just any old silence. This wasn’t the satisfied, congenial silence of an afternoon during siesta. No, this was the type of silence that welcomed the restless afreet, demon, to perform his shadowy tricks; the type of silence that the impetuous jinn sniffed out like a bear does blood.

  She stared at the papers on the breakfast table. Without any enthusiasm, she picked up the pile of invoices and started to organise them by date. Could not concentrate. The silence of the morning frightened her. Nothing stirred. Not the call of the butcherbird, not the caw of a currawong. Only the thin hum of the refrigerator and her thumping heart. Still, the silence stretched and yawned. Her mind was agape and vulnerable to the prying jinn. She knew exactly what she needed.

  Abdel Halim Hafez. The record was crammed in a drawer with newspapers and magazines. The cover was so thin it was almost translucent and had torn at the edges. She had carried it with her from Alexandria to Sydney to Burraboo. It was the only music that she and Fawzy had bought together.

  She placed the needle on the vinyl. The violins began first, then after a short while the excited percussion of drums, tambourines, and finger cymbals started. She swung out her arms, jiggled her shoulders; swayed her hips with the building percussion. Her head fell backwards, her body was weightless, was music itself. She turned up the volume of the record player, heard the music jump on a scratched section of the vinyl. She didn’t care. Remembered her nena, who was always draped in swathes of black clothing that never quite disguised the disfiguring hump on her back. Her nena shelled broad beans faster than anyone Nayeema knew, spoke fluent Greek and danced like a woman half her age, hump and all. She showed Nayeema and her younger cousin, Dalia, how to wiggle with their belly and hips, and they’d giggle and jiggle up and down the narrow hallway of their apartment with the privilege that the very old share with the very young.

  ‘You’re teaching them how to dance like peasants,’ chided Soraya.

  ‘They’ll thank me one day,’ her nena would reply breathlessly, not stopping for a moment, ‘for teaching them how to dance like women.’ Nena always got her own way.

  The music paused for the briefest second as the first strains of Abdel Halim Hafez’s singing began, rendering the sweetest voice, the complexity of emotion unlike any other. She closed her eyes as he sang. Nayeema crumpled to her feet, the weight of memory too great to keep her upright. Sheets of tears tumbled from her and she cried so hard she barked. She shook on the carpet. The jinn had won.

  She hauled herself onto the sofa, disturbing the horizontal cushion arrangement that Fawzy had left this morning. They had gone to Gosford together to buy this fashionable sofa setting, not long after moving into the house. They had each quickly claimed an armchair as their favourite—just as they had wordlessly decided, once they were married, which side of the bed they preferred, and which two chairs at the six-seat dining table they would use every night. Was it like this with all marriages? The three-seat sofa positioned between the two armchairs was almost ornamental in the evenings, unused but kept neat, as though they were expecting a guest to arrive at any minute.

  In Alexandria, in the period immediately after they were married, while she was adjusting to the cold silence with her brothers, she and Fawzy were learning how to negotiate their awkwardness with one another. Their over-politeness, their concern for each other’s comfort was incessant. Was she too warm, too cold, would she like an extra cushion? Perhaps she would like the window opened a little for air? Should they go for a walk to get gelato?

  Before that, before her parents died, before her brothers became cruel and greedy, before her grandmother passed away, before her aunt and her younger cousin Dalia stopped coming to the flat, before all that, every day was loud and intimate and exhausting, especially at mealtimes. She and her noisy family would seat themselves on cushions on the floor, their legs and bottoms shuffling at first as everyone found their space around the wooden tabla. A half-dozen or so steaming dishes on top of the tabla vied for their appetites. They knocked one another’s elbows as they ate. The only moment of silence was the one just after the brief, solemn prayer her father would offer, then hunger took over and spoons scraped over plates and beneath teeth. Nayeema’s breath caught at the memory: with so many of her family now dead, and even the alive dead to her, the quiet room in Hungerford Place was too immense for her.

  To comfort herself, she thought of her inlet on the bay in the full bloom of the afternoon, as clouds shifted and cast shadows over the water, when light through the shallows made the water dance pale. She was happiest when she was there on the bay, with the spray of water and brine and wind on her face.

  She heard a car brake hard outside the house. Fudge. That was Goldie. Quickly wiping her hands over her face, she rose to her feet. The slender figure outside on the front patio was wearing tight sky-blue trousers, which wrapped around her thighs like hot toffee around an almond. She rapped against the window and let herself in.

  ‘Hi, honey. Hey, you okay? Has something happened?’

  ‘Homesick. Am okay.’ Nayeema stopped the record player.

  ‘Hey, I was enjoying that music. Eastern … cool. You didn’t have to stop it for me.’

  ‘I stop it for me.’ She looked up at Goldie, saw her freckled nose and her lagoon blue eyes and felt instantly comforted. ‘Can we work on the new menu another time? It feels useless now that your uncle …’

  Goldie wrapped both arms around Nayeema’s shoulders and squeezed her in a tight embrace. Her hair swaddled Nayeema’s face. ‘We have loads of time to figure out the new menu. Let’s chill instead. I’d rather hear the rest of your music collection. Think you can play me something else from Egypt? Something that will make you happy?’

  Just like that. Oh, Goldie could create something out of nothing. Nayeema smiled for the first time that day.

  ‘Yes!’ She rummaged through a shoe box of cassette recordings in search of the right music. ‘Ah-ha,’ she shouted, her face glowing, and waved a cassette above her head. Abdel Wahab was legendary when she was growing up. Burraboo or Alexandria—it didn’t matter—this music was capable of stirring anyone.

  Straightaway, Goldie tapped the palm of her hand against her bare knee, the ten or so beads and bangles wrapped around her wrist chinked like discordant chimes with the music. ‘Hey,’ Goldie shouted, ‘I dig i
t,’ and began tapping her foot as well as her hand. Her body swayed and jerked with unabashed pleasure. Goldie extended her legs, those lean, silky legs, and leaped to her feet. As she moved, the smell of toothpaste and coconut oil slid deliciously into the air.

  ‘Show me how to dance, Nayeema,’ Goldie shouted gleefully, ‘you know how to belly dance, don’t you?’

  ‘Oh, no … no.’

  ‘Sure you can.’

  ‘Yes. I can, but not now.’

  ‘Oh come on—’ Goldie grabbed Nayeema’s clammy hands and playfully twirled her around in a circle, ‘—this will be fun.’ Placing her hands on Nayeema’s hips. she explained, ‘I was told that putting your hands on your hips is the best way to learn. So come on, show me.’ She laughed and tossed her neck back so far that her shiny locks bounced against the bottom of her back.

  ‘Okay. I show you some movements, simple ones. First you learn how to twist your hips.’ She placed her own hand over Goldie’s. She snapped her left hip forward and her right hip back, then repeated the movement a few times. ‘Okay, you try now.’

  Goldie complied with a spirited twist of her hips, yowling enthusiastically, her shining eyes seeking Nayeema’s approval.

  When the cassette ended and the music stopped, Nayeema and Goldie looked at one another and burst into laughter.

  ‘I’ll make us tea. We don’t need to be at the houseboat for another hour,’ said Goldie, wiping her forehead. ‘Put some more music on for us.’

  Goldie walked towards the kitchen, passing the breakfast table covered with papers. ‘Wow. That’s a whole lot of work,’ she called out. ‘Can’t Grieves get one of his minions to do all that bookwork?’

  Nayeema put her beloved Carpenters album on the player and joined Goldie in the kitchen. She tidied the papers into piles. ‘I want to learn. Is important I understand these business things.’

  ‘For your earring palace?’

  ‘Piercing palace,’ she corrected. ‘I would like you to come with me … to Sydney, when I open my piercing palace. We make good team.’

  ‘We do.’ Goldie poured milk into the teacups and sat down at the breakfast table. ‘It’s hard to think that far ahead, honey. Anything can happen.’

  ‘Anything? Like what?’

  ‘Maybe you’ll fall pregnant. How does a baby or two change your plans?’

  Nayeema stared at the gumnut baby pattern on the tablecloth.

  ‘We don’t talk about having babies.’

  ‘Why not, honey?’

  ‘If a baby comes it comes. So far, no baby.’

  ‘But you’re trying aren’t you … it doesn’t always happen straight away. But the chances are …’

  Nayeema felt a sharp splinter shoot up from her abdomen to her chest, a familiar stab that moved through her organs; the same shaking grief that kept her awake in the night. Her grief lived beneath the surface, buried under conversations, like the anguished serpent Apep, who was denied his escape from beneath the horizon and into the sky to chase the sun.

  ‘And what if you don’t have enough money to start your piercing palace?’

  ‘I will have enough money … from the cafe. I save my money.’

  ‘Yes. But how can that be enough? Honey, how on earth are you going to be able to afford it?’

  Nayeema’s gaze fell to the floor. Everyone had secrets. Goldie kept hers as close as her skin.

  ‘I don’t want to get you down or ruin your racket. You know your own mind. That’s killer cool. It’s just that … I was wondering how this dream of yours is going to work.’

  ‘Why don’t you think I can do it?’

  ‘Honey, you can do it. I believe in you. I wonder how you will do it. I wonder about that all the time. I just want you to keep an open mind. Things change all the time.’ Goldie looked intently at Nayeema, her killer cool blue eyes soft and beseeching. They both sipped their tea, the clink of their teacups on the table, their gentle gulps the only sounds in the jinn-ravaged room.

  ‘How about your husband … how is he helping your piercing parlour plans?’

  ‘Before the Annabel girl went missing, he wanted to buy the Burraboo pharmacy. Now, he stops talking about buying. Tell me, does your uncle talk to you about his plans for the houseboat—once the two months are finished? Does he tell you any more about selling to me? Why does he not speak with me?’

  ‘He still doesn’t know what to do with the houseboat … but he’s keeping an open mind and that’s a good thing, honey. Let’s go back to your plans and your husband. Do you plan to move to Sydney and open up your piercing parlour while he stays here?’

  ‘When the girl comes back home, when she is found, maybe we go to Sydney together.’

  ‘But what if he doesn’t? What if he still wants to buy the pharmacy?’

  ‘So, we live apart for some of the time.’

  ‘Some of the time or all of the time?’ Goldie’s voice had dropped to barely above a whisper and her mouth had turned up into that reassuring radiant smile that could melt away any of the day’s sharp edges.

  Nayeema had never considered not living with Fawzy. They had left Alexandria together, and from familiarity with each other they stepped into comfort. However flimsy their marriage was, they were united. It seemed clear to her that in the sequence of events that unravelled after her parents had died, she and Fawzy had been brought together to marry. Without that complete sequence, with just one of those calamitous events missing in the chain, they simply would not have married. Goldie’s suggestion invoked such sudden anger and terror and exhilaration in Nayeema that she felt dizzy and wondered whether the afreet was playing tricks with them both. What did Goldie know of the childhood she and Fawzy had known? What did Goldie know about the strength of their shared affection? Sometimes, in her most quiet moments, Nayeema couldn’t see how she and Fawzy could possibly make an entire life together but it was a painful, guilty thought that she’d kept burrowed deep within. She had told herself, for so long, that they were in this Australia thing together, however imperfect it was, however empty of passion, of children; they had saved one another and that meant something.

  ‘I think we go together to Sydney. Once the girl comes back, I think he will not want to stay in Burraboo,’ said Nayeema.

  ‘You think?’

  ‘Yes.’ Her voice sounded as thin as a sheet of papyrus.

  ‘Living apart sounds like the kind of arrangement I’d be digging if I were you. Catch my drift?’ Goldie gave a wry smile. ‘You don’t need him to open up your piercing parlour or to run a cafe. Everything you need you’ve already got. It’s inside you in spades.’

  Nayeema looked at her friend, noticed the delicate, feathery hairs that had broken away from her long braid. Noticed the strength of the ropey sinew that ran down Goldie’s long and elegant neck. There was quiet power in that neck. Goldie had shaken her by the shoulders. Not for the first time.

  The piercing parlour in Sydney was not a misshapen dream. Now that her beloved kiosk was surrendered to Frank Pritchett, her piercing parlour was her best hope for a future with joy. For the first time in four years, she saw happiness glint at her from the distance. This wasn’t the rascal afreet playing tricks with her eyes. She had to be ready. The dawn would break whether or not the cock crowed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY - SEVEN

  Look at him. How his gaunt arms poked out of his body. How his back hunched over in defeat as he sat cross-legged and shirtless on the beach towel. Look at him. He’d probably been here all day, clueless about the hysteria in town this morning. Funny how no one from the cop shop had even thought to contact the poor bastard, even though they’d been stringing him along by the balls for weeks now. To watch Fred shrivel was something else. Like he was being eaten from the inside by some parasite that landed in his guts.

  Sometimes, a man had to do something a little underhanded to do the right thing. Paying off the Pritchett girl was both rotten and right. To think that she and Cherie-bloody-Blossom had known all along that Annabel
was safe and happy, hiding with the Rainbow Lilies. To think that Bargearse hadn’t even thought to go looking for the kid at the compound; what a lazy glasshole of a cop. He’d had words with Cherie about concealing Annabel on the farm. She just didn’t get what deep shit the kid’s disappearance had caused.

  Tom stopped when he reached the end of the walking track. The crunch beneath his feet went silent and the steady hum of cicadas and the rumble of breaking waves took over. Three more steps and his shoes would fill with sand; he would be on the open beach.

  Blimey, Fred’s head was bent so far forward into his lap that he looked decapitated from behind. Perhaps he was reading. Fred looked up at a squawking seagull. His head was restored to his body.

  Tom quickly surveyed the beach. The water was terrible for swimming today. Waves were breaking much further out than he was used to seeing, white and mashed-up foaming sets that roared onto the shore. Only the mad would want to swim in that. Explained why there were so few people on the beach and why it was so easy to spot Fred.

  Seagulls darted and swirled above the ocean and the beach. They flapped and glided in circles then zigzagged in lines, delirious with air and wind and brine. Sea eagles swept through the air majestically on outstretched wings. The darkness and sleekness of their elegant form drew his eye up and he watched in a thrall as they spiralled through the light air.

  He started to make his way towards Fred. The sand was surprisingly warm and made squelching noises beneath his pancake-flat feet. Sand flew up his thighs. When he was close enough to be heard he shouted out his greetings. Fred rose to his feet. It was Neema that Tom thought of now, and how he had wanted to tell her the news first. To watch her face and listen to her voice shift gears. But the right thing was to tell Fred.

  ‘Tom.’ Fred nodded and extended an arm. ‘This is an unusual place to see you.’ His face fell suddenly and his mouth went slack with alarm. ‘Is everything okay with Nayeema? Has something happened?’

  ‘Oh, Neema is fine. I’m glad that I’ve found you.’ He paused for a moment. ‘There’s been some news. Big news, in fact, concerning Annabel White.’