Grace's Table

by Sally Piper

  Grace had sometimes taken pleasure from these acts, having few other ways of demonstrating her hurt. She supposed it was a childish victory, nothing more than school-ground retribution. And often the punished failed to notice they had been anyway. Unless, of course, she’d served up something Des disliked. Then she was sure to get his attention, especially after that time she took over buying the meat.

  Some of Grace’s friends had envied her a husband who took the responsibility of meat purchase off the weekly shopping list. Grace had resented it. Des would bring home the week’s supply of meat on payday, already wrapped and labelled for her to put straight into the freezer. Some days he’d even take a bundle out to thaw, leave it in the sink on his way to work, without so much as a Thought we could have pork chops for tea or What are the chances of beef casserole tonight? Just icy chunks left to seep blood down the drain and attract flies. And if the label had come off, sometimes she had to wait till it thawed before she could work out what it was she had to cook for that evening’s meal.

  But there was a day when Grace had opened that freezer and been faced with the usual two-pound bags of mince for rissoles, steak or chops for grilling, joint for roasting – and she’d slammed the door shut on the predictable lot, making the old Kelvinator rattle on its feet.

  It was a determined woman who got in the car that morning and drove to the shop where Des worked. She went there wanting skirt steak to make beef olives, or a boned leg of lamb that she could keep the tin of Keens from, season it instead with a mixture of spices from India or Africa or fill it with a farce flavoured with lemon peel and garlic then wrap it tightly in foil and slow-cook it. She wanted meat that could be served with pasta or rice – no mash, no fried onions, no pumpkin, no frozen peas. She wanted to make complicated dishes, dishes fragrantly exotic. Dishes Des wouldn’t like.

  Sitting in the car she watched him work his lady customers like a craftsman. She didn’t know if he saw her there, though he easily could have. All he had to do was look up when he was taking sausages or liver or bacon from the window display and he’d see her sitting behind the wheel of the Belmont, watching him. He didn’t wave if he did notice her, not that she would expect him to. The footpath had always marked a fine divide between his place and hers and he rarely acknowledged her across it when she’d walk past the shop on her errands.

  Inside, she could see it was busy – two, three deep at the counter – but this didn’t dampen Des’s enthusiasm to give each of his customers time for a laugh and a longer chat than was necessary. Grace could see the way he held a woman’s eye as he handed over packages of meat. He’d rest his hand on the bundle for a moment when he placed it on the countertop, not releasing it until he was ready, once he’d got one more smile, one more blush. Young or old, he’d flirt with them. The only difference was he’d pass the older customer’s packages over more quickly, then scan left or right again to see who was next, showing whoever it was his perfect teeth.

  Did her butcher husband recognise the intimacy he shared with these women as he guided them on what might be good to feed their husbands, those wives who were always looking for new ways to please? He could hint at what would get them the greatest praise, a kiss even or more, if the cut was particularly flavoursome, especially tender. She imagined him saying, The lamb’s at its springtime best, it’ll melt in his mouth or Leave the front door open when you roast this pork and he’ll smell how much you love him even before he’s unlatched the gate. They’d leave his service with a wink and a tightly wrapped package containing the promise of a good night, not just a meal of meat.

  The Casanova of quality cuts, that’s what Grace thought as she watched him work.

  Once numbers had dwindled inside, Grace got out of the car, locked the driver’s door and crossed the footpath divide. She’d come for choice, not false affection. She entered the shop and stood behind a slim woman in hugging tweed trousers and a knitted sweater that made a prize of her breasts. Grace looked down at her own fitted skirt and button-through blouse and thought: You’ll do. If Des looked at her, thigh-level first then up to her face, as he had previous customers, then, yes, she’d definitely do.

  It had been so long since Grace had stepped inside a butcher’s shop that she’d forgotten the smell. Quarters and halves of carcasses hung along the back wall. There were trotters and honeycombed tripe and hindquarters, small and large, held up by hooks through knee joints. What animal they once were, or part thereof, was awfully clear. One of the butchers was using a bandsaw to dismember those larger sections into smaller portions. Grace watched the marrow and fat gum up the blade as he sectioned a lamb’s back into loin chops. The sawdust on the floor caught the bloody drips and made his footsteps soft.

  Des worked over a forequarter of beef at a deeply worn and stained wooden block. The open chest cavity glistened at Grace and the white rib bones that showed through reminded her of the toothy, laughing entrance she’d seen at Luna Park. She’d always considered that mouth to be a macabre welcome to a place of fun, like being swallowed by a greedy giant. This rib cage had a similar effect.

  Des held a large cleaver in his right hand. He raised it above his head and brought it down hard on the ragged and bloodied neck end. The action was done with such authority and strength that she imagined if the animal’s head had been still attached then he could just as easily have hacked it off in one blow as well. A quick and efficient beheading. For a moment she faltered in her cause, even considered turning around and leaving the shop before he noticed her there. This wasn’t a place for the unsure, not when things were being done around her with such certainty. But it was too late for that.

  ‘What can I get for you, love?’

  Grace’s gaze was taken away from Des’s back and she looked into the playful eyes of one of the other butchers.

  ‘I’d like a pound of thinly sliced veal, please.’

  ‘Grace, what are you doin’ here?’

  Grace tried to appear brave. She looked around her as if Des might have lost his senses. ‘Buying meat,’ she said.

  ‘We can’t have run out at home.’

  ‘No, we haven’t,’ she said, ‘but I wanted something other than what was at home.’

  Des looked at her incredulously, like she might be the one who’d lost her mind. ‘How could you want somethin’ other than what’s at home? There’s a pile of meat in the freezer.’

  ‘I want veal,’ she said. ‘There’s no veal in the freezer.’

  Des looked flummoxed. ‘Veal?’

  ‘Yes, veal.’

  ‘I don’t like veal. It’s got no flavour.’ Des embedded the cleaver into the timber block then picked up the severed neck end and flung it into a bucket on the floor.

  Grace shrugged. She noticed the man who was serving her had paused, knife edge resting on the pink slab in front of him, torn between slicing it thinly and putting it back in the refrigerated cabinet.

  ‘A pound, please,’ she said.

  ‘So what’re ya gonna do with it?’ Des sounded sulky, like Peter when he’d been told off.

  Grace wouldn’t be put off, she decided. She smiled sweetly at the man as he carved off the slices.

  ‘Make veal parmigiana,’ she said, ‘with garlic bread, I think, and a nice green salad.’

  ‘Bloody wog food.’

  The butcher serving Grace secured her paper-wrapped package with twine, looped the long end of it round his index finger then snapped it free from the roll with a jerk of his hand. He placed the parcel on the counter in front of her, held his hand on it as though she might consider returning it. She didn’t wait to see if Des would offer to put the cost of the meat on his tab. She opened her purse and handed the man a note.

  Thanking him, she left the shop with her neatly wrapped package, but not without hearing, ‘You’ve got yourself a feisty one there, Des.’

  The cleaver came down hard again as the sho
p’s door closed behind her. She imagined the animal’s spine severed in two.

  For a while after that Grace had made her own weekly meat list. She’d stand and wait her turn like all the other women, flirt even with some of the butchers on occasions, and order her meat for osso buco and stroganoff and moussaka. Her inventiveness proved short-lived though, because before long she went back to giving Des exactly what he liked.

  ‘There were plenty of times your father thought he’d been starved.’ Grace took another pea from the diminishing pile.

  Susan snorted. ‘Not the way I saw it. You always gave him a mountain of food – much more than he needed.’

  ‘That’s because he’d complain if he saw too much of his plate at the start of a meal.’

  ‘Do you think those comments about being expected to live off china flowers were a complaint? They were jokes, Mum. He wasn’t really asking for more but you always gave it to him. And given the state of his heart – his diabetes – it would’ve done him good to see a bit more of his plate, not less. It was a dangerous habit you got him into.’

  ‘Dangerous habit I got him into? Don’t blame me. Your father was responsible for his own eating habits.’

  Between them, in the sudden quiet, peas popped into the bowl.

  Des had always been a dangerous eater. The closeness to animal fat all his working life – fat that kept his hands soft, clothes stained and hair slick – never deterred him from liking his food cooked in it. If asked about his favourite meal, Grace knew, he’d say it was a breakfast fry-up: The working man’s heart-starter, he called it. But Grace thought his eating habits marked him as a weak man. It was a weakness that would eventually strangle him by the coronary arteries at the age of fifty-four.

  ‘You’re a damn fine cook when you put your mind to it,’ Des said to Grace, long after her triumph at the butcher’s had served its purpose.

  Des appraised his plate. Two thick sausages, their ends turned up like old boots; two long rashers of streaky bacon, the fat brown and crispy as he liked it; two fried eggs, sitting like perfect breasts, bathed in oil and out sunning themselves; and potato cubes fried with onion.

  ‘Tomato?’ Grace asked.

  ‘No. That’d spoil it.’ Des pinched a generous amount of salt between thumb and forefinger from a small bowl beside his plate, a bowl Grace made sure was always full, and sprinkled it over his food. ‘You not eating?’

  Grace shook her head. ‘I’ll have something later.’

  ‘You should be having something like this.’ Des pointed to his plate with his knife. ‘You’re looking scrawny.’

  Grace sat down and sipped her tea. She watched as he trawled a square of toast through a ruptured yolk and lifted it to his greasy-cornered mouth. The sound of cutting and scraping across a china plate filled the otherwise quiet kitchen. In the distance Grace could hear the rhythmic squeak of a child’s swing toing and froing and the busy attempts of a fly trying to find its way out of the flyscreen at the kitchen window.

  ‘Get us another bit of toast, would you.’

  Grace got up, cut a slice from the loaf and put it in the toaster. She waited at the bench while it cooked.

  ‘Another hot one,’ Des said, looking out the kitchen window.

  Though it was still early, Grace could feel the weight of that heat pressing against the stillness in the room. ‘I miss the cold,’ she said, almost to herself, as she watched the heat shimmer above the toaster.

  ‘Miss the what?’

  ‘The cold. From Harvest. When I was a girl.’

  ‘You can have your cold. Give me the heat any day.’

  ‘But it’s all the same. If we’re lucky it gets cool at best. But usually it’s just one day as warm or warmer than another. When you feel really cold – hard frosts, a bit of snow on the hills, that sort of thing – you have to make adjustments and it’s those adjustments that let you know you’re still alive. Otherwise how can you tell the difference from one day to the next?’

  ‘By the six o’clock news. That toast ready yet?’

  Grace hooked a nail under the metal edge of the drop-sided toaster. The Bakelite handle had broken off long ago. She passed the hot toast from hand to hand and onto a small plate she’d taken from the cupboard. She embedded a butter knife into the dripping tin beside the stove and dragged it across the bench toward her. From inside she dug out a generous measure of the fat and spread it right to the edges of the toast.

  She handed Des the plate. He slid the toast onto his and set about cutting it into symmetrical squares, which he used to mop up the leftover juices and fat on his plate. She always marvelled at this attention to detail and the neatness with which he ate, which never went beyond his meals and the dissection of slabs of meat.

  Des rested back in his chair, flicked crumbs from his shirt to the floor. His front was much flatter than it should have been. But nursing had shown Grace that disease didn’t always present itself as expected. Sometimes it worked covertly, mostly under the surface, like an iceberg. Des rolled his tongue around his teeth, licked and smacked bits free from the gaps. He washed down whatever he’d collected with a swill of tea.

  Peter strolled into the kitchen, eyes half-closed with sleep and hair sitting every-which-way but flat. The smell of stale alcohol secreted from his skin as much as it came from his breath and dominated the musty smell of sleep.

  ‘Big night out with the lads, mate?’ Des asked.

  ‘Ugh.’

  Des chuckled in between taking slurps from his tea.

  Peter opened the fridge, propped himself up against the door, scanned the shelves before closing it again, empty-handed.

  ‘There’s nothin’ to eat.’

  ‘There’s plenty. You just need to be here when it’s served,’ Grace said.

  ‘Give the kid a break. Can’t you see he’s had a big night?’

  ‘So?’

  ‘C’mon, help the young fella out and cook him a good recovery breakfast. Sit down, champ. Mum’ll rustle you up something.’ Des pulled a chair out from the kitchen table, slapped the seat of it.

  ‘You can wait until I finish my tea.’ Grace sipped at her tea slowly, tried to savour it, but the flavour was lost. Disgruntled, she got up, tipped the last of it down the sink. ‘I’ll make you poached eggs,’ she said, clanging a saucepan onto a burner.

  ‘Give the kid a fry-up like you gave me. It’s the best cure for a hangover.’

  ‘I’ve used up all the bacon and sausages,’ she lied.

  Des slid his cup across the table. ‘Any more tea in the pot?’

  Grace took the empty cup back to the bench. She added a dash of milk then filled it with tea from the pot. It was dark and strong now. Stand a spoon up in it, Pa would have said.

  ‘Don’t forget to sugar it,’ Des called. ‘Just the one.’

  Grace added two, and stirred.

  ‘I don’t think he knew how to take responsibility for what he ate,’ Susan said, after a silence, wrapping her empty pods into a bundle with the newspaper. She got up and took the package to the bin.

  ‘Compost,’ Grace called.

  Susan changed tack from bin to compost bucket. ‘After all, he left school when he was barely fourteen. Wasn’t one to read much. How was he to know better?’

  ‘The doctors told him, so he knew well enough,’ Grace said.

  ‘I suppose you both did.’

  Grace picked up the last pod, a malnourished looking thing whose failure to thrive made it not worth the effort.

  ‘Which is the odd thing really.’ Susan rested both hands on the edge of the sink and stared out the kitchen window.

  Grace watched her daughter’s back, stiff, straight, and wondered if she was taking in the view or considering the paradox. Given the view wasn’t much she could only assume it was the latter.

  Grace wrapped her pods up neat and
tight like a butcher’s bundle for the compost bucket, and forced it down on top of Susan’s.

  6

  ‘They look like op-shop specials.’

  ‘Eclectic, I’d call them.’ Grace defended her twelve assorted dinner plates, from finest bone china to heavy earthenware. ‘That one I painted myself, when I was going through a crafty stage. Thought I was the next Clarice Cliff.’ This was a plate lurid with simple but bright purple and yellow crocuses. ‘And this one …’ she held a white porcelain plate up to the dining room window, where the sunlight made it appear translucent, and thereby revealed its quality, ‘was one of a pair given to me by Bev. That’s what makes it special. More than the Wedgwood mark on the back.’

  ‘Aren’t you worried it’ll be broken?’

  ‘Better to have it out to enjoy but at risk, than tucked away in the back of a cupboard where there’s no pleasure in owning it.’

  Susan shrugged. ‘I suppose so, but once it’s gone, it’s gone.’

  ‘Aren’t we all.’

  ‘What about this thing?’ Susan lifted a large and weighty nut-brown stoneware plate from the table. ‘Scratching around to find a twelfth?’

  Grace laughed. ‘That’s the one I keep to remind me of church.’

  ‘Church?’

  ‘The church plate. It was ugly as sin too.’

  Just as the plate Susan held was the ugliest on the table, the Catholic Church in Harvest had been the ugliest building in town. It dominated a large bare block on the outskirts, across the road from the equally austere Catholic primary school. The grass along its concrete paths was trimmed with precision and there was never a trace of the last wedding’s confetti to be found on the ground. Not even its wide, stepped entrance or fancy tiled floor in the vestibule made it softer on the eye. Whenever Grace walked into the building she felt as though she was entering a large, red-bricked coffin. Each Sunday, as Mother drove towards it, Grace’s spirits dropped.

  ‘Why doesn’t Joe have to come with us?’ Grace knew the answer but was in the mood for goading her mother.