Joel & Cat Set the Story Straight

by Nick Earls

  For my birthday two years ago, we went to a restaurant at St Lucia – a place on the brink of taking itself too seriously. The person looking after our table propped the specials board on a chair and started her explanation. Which all went well until she came to something served with pan-fried baby mushrooms and she accidentally said ‘served with pan-fried babies’. My mother laughed till wine practically came out her nose.

  ‘Maybe pollo encebollado,’ she’s saying. ‘That’s chicken with onions.’

  She’s been googling Salvadorean recipes at work. She wants tonight to be great. I have different hopes, and some guilt about that, just for a moment.

  ‘Atmosphere,’ she says, and she never stops moving. She throws red-and-orange fabric – old scarves, I think – over the lamps and turns the main lights off. She sorts out her lipstick with a glance in the hall mirror, her free hand simultaneously pointing out rogue books and magazines that suddenly, urgently need me to tidy them. She ducks into her bedroom, rummages noisily, makes a brief appearance in the hallway in what can only be described as a poncho.

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘No.’ And she balls it up and flings it back through her bedroom door.

  I want to medicate her. One of those tranquilliser darts they use to bring down big cats would do.

  When Betty arrives, my mother squeezes limes, crushes ice and makes cocktails for the two of them. Something Cuban – as close as she could get to Salvadorean. Betty sits on a stool at the breakfast bar, and we watch my mother flitting. She doesn’t usually flit.

  ‘Oh dear,’ Betty says quietly, and I know what she means.

  Our dinner to unmask Jorge the charlatan has become some Salvadorean fiesta bonding event for my mother. Betty is doing her bit, wearing every Central American souvenir she’s got and looking like an Aztec sacrifice. Lapis lazuli, bird feathers and – so very wrong – cleavage. But it’s the flitting that worries us both. That and the sense of occasion, which has my mother in its grip. It’s altogether too special.

  Until Jorge arrives.

  My mother unlocks the foyer door when he buzzes the intercom, then she rushes into the kitchen to pour him a cocktail. Outside, the lift groans, and there’s a thump as Jorge pushes on the door to our flat. It swings open, and there he is with some CDs tucked under his arm and two plastic Coles bags in his hands.

  ‘Whoa,’ he says, peering into the atmospheric semi-darkness. ‘It’s very… for big occasion.’

  My mother jumps him with the cocktail and says, perkily, ‘Salvadorean food. That’s quite a big occasion. You’ve never cooked for us before.’

  A tight troubled smile stretches out across his face. ‘That’s… wonderful.’ He looks at Betty, then at me. ‘And lights down is good. Very good for this. A good feel. Very Salvadorean. Like my mother’s kitchen where there was just one lamp.’

  ‘Oh, your mother’s kitchen,’ my mother says, nostalgically, her brain plundering movies about other places and putting together some fake Salvadorean memory – dirt floors, terracotta roof tiles, chickens in the yard and, inside, a strong long-suffering woman rolling out tortillas. ‘I’m sure you had some wonderful food there. What are we having tonight?’

  ‘Is surprise,’ he says. ‘Must be surprise. So you ladies, and young man, enjoy drinks and I will cook.’ He hands her the CDs which, it turns out, he’s borrowed from his brother’s salsa-class collection, and he says, ‘Please, music.’

  With that, the atmosphere is complete. My mother puts on the CD and starts moving to it in a minimalist version of salsa dancing, which I don’t really want to see. Jorge goes into the kitchen and pulls out the range hood, casting a low-level light onto the counters. Maybe it’s respect for atmosphere, maybe it’s about hiding his dirty non-Salvadorean deeds. In his mother’s kitchen there was just one lamp, I tell myself. And then he lifts the shopping bags onto the counter, and it turns out the range-hood light is easily bright enough to reveal the Old El Paso taco kit packaging through the thin blue plastic. Reality is going to hit with a thump tonight.

  He lifts out onions and mince, sneaks out the El Paso box.

  ‘Mustn’t look, mustn’t look,’ he says, though it’s pointless in a kitchen that opens to the lounge room on two sides. He knows I’m looking. ‘I just bring it in this,’ he says to me with a shitty tone. ‘Is good box, okay?’

  My mother’s salsa-dancing reverie is broken by the talk, and she turns and sees him there with the box in his hands. He’s facing mostly away from her, intent on the instructions. From the look on my mother’s face, it’s as if he’s just hefted a dead dog onto the counter and taken to it with the carving knife.

  He turns his back to us completely and says, ‘Mustn’t look,’ again, then coughs to cover the sound of cardboard ripping as he opens the box.

  The pinky-orangey atmospheric light illuminates the furrows on my mother’s forehead. The salsa music plays on, ignored.

  ‘Right,’ my mother says. ‘Right. Mustn’t look.’

  She strikes up a forced conversation with Betty about her day. There’s a pop from the kitchen as Jorge breaks the seal on the El Paso sauce bottle.

  He chops onions, fries them with mince, says, ‘Ah, so much like old El Salvador,’ as some very generic cooking smells drift through the room.

  He tears open a bag of chopped lettuce and tips it onto a plate. My mother reads the CD liner notes intently.

  ‘Lovely music,’ Betty says. ‘Very lively.’

  Jorge opens a foil sachet from the El Paso packet and shakes its red powder onto the mince and onions. I set the table and, while I’m in the kitchen getting cutlery, Jorge is slicing open a packet of generic grated cheddar. I imagine this is what Mexican night looks like in a student share house.

  He brings the food out to the table and says to my mother and Betty, ‘Please, come.’ There’s an underplayed sense of ceremony about it, just a hint of flourish as his hands indicate the dimly lit feast.

  We take our seats. My mother searches her entire vocab for a word to describe what she sees, and she settles on ‘lovely’. Her lack of conviction is clear.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ Betty says. ‘El Salvador. What memories. Vivid memories.’ She scoops mince into a taco shell, adds some lettuce and tomato and a spoonful of salsa and takes a bite. ‘Hmm,’ she says when it’s done. ‘Vivid memories.’ But not, clearly, of any meal like this.

  ‘My mother,’ Jorge says apologetically, ‘she was terrible cook. Family disgrace. We all came away very… limited. It would be better not to speak of her again.’

  I wait, but he says nothing more. So the inquisition begins.

  ‘What did everyone else’s mothers cook?’ I ask him. ‘The experts in the village – what did they cook?’

  ‘Beans,’ he says uncomfortably, as though wrestling with the lie so that he can keep it still long enough to tell it. ‘Many things with beans. We smell the smells. Beautiful smells. But we no eat. There was… politics. And then the war. And things with corn. They cook them too. Hard things and soft things. And ones like a pancake.’

  ‘What about for special occasions?’

  He glares at me, then blinks and pretends to be thoughtful. ‘For birthdays we did not have cake, no. A potato?’

  ‘A potato?’

  ‘The word means different in El Salvador. More festive.’ He turns to my mother. ‘More festive. More wine, Sandra? Anything you need?’

  ‘I’m fine, thanks,’ she says. She’s been watching the exchange, and the last of the hope is draining from her voice.

  The relentless salsa rhythm pulses on in the background. My mother picks up a handful of grated cheese as if it’s a used tissue and drops it sadly into her half-made taco. I ask about saints’ days, Jorge fumbles his way through something about parades and going to church.

  I push him and ask about the village patron saint and he says, almost proudly, ‘San Gimignano. He is our saint.’ My mother suggests that San Gimignano was Italian and Jorge looks flustered before recovering with, ‘Yes,
but once a saint, then a saint for all the world.’

  There’s another pause, more uninspired taco assembly.

  ‘So,’ Betty says, like someone’s charming grandmother. ‘Tell us a bit about these. These things that look a lot like taco shells.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ Jorge says, the slow weight of lies starting to drag in his voice. ‘They do. Corn is a staple throughout Central America, as you would have found. And this, not the taco shell but the flat-bottomed taco shell, is El Salvador’s gift to the cuisine of corn.’

  ‘So it’s the flat bottom that’s Salvadorean?’ Betty says, luring him on.

  ‘Yes. It was invented years ago in the mountains when everyone was sick of tacos falling over. And a young boy, he invented it and became famous throughout the land, carried on the shoulders of the grateful population.’

  My turn now. ‘And his name was…?’

  Jorge’s eyes narrow as he looks my way. ‘His name? His name was… Jose.’

  ‘Just Jose? No surname?’

  ‘Just Jose. He is hero in our country. Many heroes, they have just one name. Madonna? Just one name. Same for Jose.’

  ‘And his story is remarkably like the El Paso taco ad on TV.’

  ‘Remarkable, yes. Truth in advertising. Who knew?’

  ‘And what happened to Jose after that?’

  There’s a pause, a sluggish lie-free pause that needs the right lie to fall at the end of it. ‘He died in war. We talk no more of Jose.’

  More silence, more shovelling of ingredients. Time to go in for the kill.

  ‘So, um, salsa then,’ I say to him, picking up the bottle. ‘It means sauce, and yet it’s also the dance style. How is that?’

  ‘The dance…’ he says, and then pretends to drift off into memory while he battles with his next piece of fakery. ‘The dance is about how the woman… she makes the sauce. And the man… he likes it…’

  ‘Right. You’re not Salvadorean at all, are you?’

  There’s a tight ugly silence for just a second or two and then he says, ‘Diablo,’ angrily. It’s almost a snarl. ‘Donde este la oficina de correos, por favor.’

  Maybe I was wrong. That’s the thought that grips me as Jorge takes offence and suddenly speaks fierce, frenzied Spanish. Maybe he is that sad war-damaged man from the poor family that never had food for his mother to cook, that boy on the fringes of village life who grew up idolising Jose the taco kid and dreaming of something better. I’ve taken it too far. My dirty, evil trap has backfired.

  ‘Jorge,’ my mother says in a flat lifeless voice, ‘what you’ve just said is Spanish for “Where is the post office, please?”’

  And for Jorge, it all unravels from there. The trap has snagged its faux-Salvadorean prey and my mother swoops in like a carrion bird and does the rest.

  ‘I think we’ve got some dishes to do,’ Betty says to me, dragging her chair back from the table. ‘That was lovely, Jorge.’ Politeness is an instinct by the time you’re eighty, and she shakes her head at the irrelevance of what she’s just said.

  My mother and Jorge go out to the balcony. They’re still there when the dishes are done and Betty leaves. I’m standing in the mood-lit living room, watching an argument play itself out on the other side of plate glass. That’s enough. I don’t know where it will go from here, but that’s enough for me.

  I go to my room, sit at the keyboard, stare at the screen. It’s a long time before I can read Cat’s email properly. Elizabeth. The hair brushing. I start to draft something, but it doesn’t get too far. It’s tonight’s job, but the morning will be good enough, I’m sure.

  I can’t guess at Jorge’s story yet, either. I can’t imagine what it is, who he really is, where he goes from here now that he’s heading off into the night. How much of his life is this lie? What’s left of it now that the lie doesn’t work here anymore?

  My mother needed to know. That’s what I tell myself when I think of her face when I last looked out to the balcony, her hands flailing to catch the right big gesture. One that goes with ‘You lied to me’, ‘You made a fool of me’ and maybe a dozen other more complicated things I did my best not to hear.

  The balcony door slides open. I can hear it. The front door opens, and then shuts. Something clatters into the kitchen bin. Jorge is gone.

  In the morning, I go over Cat’s email again as soon as I’m awake. I stare at it. I pick it apart. I look for a way in, anything. I’m going to have to help her out. This needs something good, some real quality.

  Okay, I’m there.

  Hey Cat,

  ‘Insane asylum’ – among the great narrative options, that’d be one step short of ‘and then she woke up’, right? Or is that what you’re planning next episode as we push the tandem-story envelope?

  Cool nude-hairbrushing scene, by the way. I assume it’s her butt that the pillow’s caressing? She’s a thoughtful one, isn’t she? Shame about the hair knot. That could wreck a person’s whole day.

  My para follows. I trust you’ll find it helpful.

  J

  There is a difference between disguise and illusion, between delusion and deep cover, Eislander told himself as he plummeted downwards, stroking the HK MP5 SD silenced submachine gun strapped across his chest. Oh, yes, they’d put him away, but that was all part of the plan. He’d busted out of worse. He’d killed armed guards with his bare hands, driven an icicle through a man’s heart. He could feel the cold of the gunmetal through his gloves. He told himself he could squeeze 800 rounds per minute from this baby, easy, and his eyes took on the glint that had given him his name and that only the dead had seen – yellowed eyes with dark slitted pupils, a panther’s eyes, the eyes of a trained assassin about to strike. Max ‘Mad Eyes’ Eislander was ready to kill again. The time had come to settle this once and for all.

  – Saturday

  For the second time now, Joel Hedges’ email to me has been dripping with sarcasm. And the guy’s an idiot. I cannot believe he actually wrote: ‘… his eyes took on the glint that had given him his name and that only the dead had seen’. If only people he was about to murder ever saw his ‘mad eyes’, then they’re not exactly capable of going around giving him a frickin’ nickname, are they? I mean, THEY’RE DEAD, dickhead. Hello?

  I can’t believe I ever liked Joel. Well, not liked him liked him. Just sort of liked him. At first, when he was with Emma, I was sorta envious. Joel was funny and cool and always made a point of including me in conversations and stuff, which is not something you can say for most people’s boyfriends. I remember when my friend Olivia was seeing Matt Stewart in Year Nine. She pretty much dumped all of us in her group and just started hanging out with Matt. Until he broke up with her at the Year Nine camp three months later and all of a sudden Olivia’s ringing me again on Saturday mornings saying, ‘Hey, Kit-Cat, watcha doin’ this arvo?’ as though nothing had happened. As though she hadn’t not invited all of us to her Idol-themed birthday dinner in favour of Matt and his dickhead mates.

  The point is that Joel was never like that. He was, I dunno, one of us. Part of our tribe. Even if he did bring Luke along with him. But then what would I know because ten months later I caught him at Westfield Indooroopilly with another girl. Cheating on Emma. And I realised that he was a bastard after all. But worse than that, he was a bastard in sheep’s clothing. Pretending like he was one of the good guys when all along he wasn’t. No wonder Joel’s so comfortable writing about delusion. He’s the master. It was a reminder to me that you should never let your guard down. Not where guys are concerned. And especially not when Joel Hedges is involved.

  I look back at Joel’s paragraph. Trust him to get off on thinking Elizabeth was naked in that scene. She wasn’t naked. In my mind she was wearing silk pyjama shorts. She could feel the velvet on the back of her thighs. God, he’s such a perve. He’s turned my para into porn or something. But that’s Joel for you, obsessed with getting his grubby little hands on as many women as possible. That’s the problem with guys who know they
’re good looking. They think they can get away with anything. Bastard!

  I look at my watch. I’ve got to be at work in a few hours. At work and as wrinkle-free as Ann-Maree’s forehead. The thought of seeing Ann-Maree creates a knot of anxiety in my stomach. I don’t want to go. I look down at my work clothes, which are still lying on the floor where they’ve been since I changed out of them on Thursday night. My clothes are slumped over like the deflated, exploited, disenfranchised victim of capitalism that I am. They look the way I feel – defeated.

  My mobile beeps. I flip it open and find a message from Emma: ‘Bridesmaid’s dress = total disaster. I look like Klinger from MASH.’

  I can’t help but smile. I’d forgotten she had the dress fitting last night. Forgotten, even though Emma spent most of yesterday going on and on about how sure she was that her cousin was going to make her walk down the aisle wearing peach taffeta. I start to think about how I still haven’t told Emma about Mum leaving. I’ve meant to. I just, I don’t know, haven’t had the energy – haven’t really wanted to talk about it to anyone. You’d think, after the police-station thing (where my mother displayed the parental skills of Michael Jackson on a balcony), Emma might have picked up that something weird was going on. But she wasn’t phased. In the car on the way home from the station, as my mother snored in the back seat, Emma pointed out that her own mother was still reeling from a lifetime ban from Wildboys Afloat. She was a little sketchy on the details, but said it involved Mrs Marchetta being very, very drunk, impersonating a journalist and attempting to interview the boys in their dressing-room using an eyeliner pencil and a serviette.

  Wrapping my dressing-gown around me, I walk past the lounge room where Mark is watching Video Hits. He’s sitting so close to the TV that I wouldn’t blame Kylie Minogue if she took out a restraining order. He’s slumped in the red beanbag, picking pineapple off a piece of rather limp-looking pizza, a one-litre bottle of Coke by his side and a greasy pizza carton at his feet.