by Sally Piper
Grace had scooped the crumbs into her cupped hand and tossed them in the bin.
Eventually, she’d stopped her mental tirade at Filip and in some ways she even felt obliged to respect his loyalty. Because where Mother had readily put aside the teachings of her church, Filip had remained true to his cultural ones. And while none of that loyalty had been extended to Grace, she never doubted he still carried the burden of his betrayal.
No amount of wine or close friendship had ever allowed Grace to share this part of her life.
15
When Grace was a girl, dessert was called pudding. Mother had served it after their evening meal as religiously as Father Donnelly had placed the sacrament on the tongues of the confessed every Sunday. But where his dry wafer was a tasteless puritan gift, Mother’s puddings had shown no constraint.
They could be complex dishes, like choux pastry made from scratch or a five-tiered trifle, the jammy Swiss roll at its base drunk with sweet sherry. Mother would add layers of preserved fruit, vanilla-infused custard and red jelly, then top it off with thick whipped cream and a sprinkling of crushed nuts. The curd in her lemon meringue pies oozed a sticky syrup that soaked right through to the pastry and each spoonful made the cheeks dimple with the lemony tang. The pie’s lightly browned meringue peaks – two or three inches deep at their highest point – dissolved on the tongue. And the crunchy-oat cobbler on Mother’s crumbles topped sweetened, poached fruit – apple, rhubarb, apricot, peach – which bubbled up in the oven through the gaps and cracks of the crust like lava. Grace remembered how later – when Mother was out of sight – she and Joe would put the empty, deep pie dish between them at the kitchen table and each use a butter knife to scrape at the caramelised sugary sides.
There were simple puddings too, for those times when Mother was busy helping with the hay harvest or calving season. Then, she’d quickly make junket or jelly in the morning before leaving the house and serve it that evening with tinned cherries – one of the few preserved fruits she bought – and cream, scooped fresh from the top of the milk in its can at the dairy. But there would still be a shortbread or Madeleine biscuit in the tin for them to have with their hot tea afterwards.
As a cook, Mother’s puddings attracted her greatest praise.
Grace imitated her mother in this way: she too presented desserts to her family like a gift at the end of a hard day’s work. But it was a tradition that had stopped like a dying man’s heartbeat in the generation that followed hers. Nowadays desserts were served only at special occasions, or taken on the hop from a tub or packet or cone, often with guilt.
One thing remained unchanged. Sugar, in all of its ingenious guises – meringue, chocolate, pastry – could reveal much about the person who consumed it.
Mother had taken hers in small, measured quantities, not denied altogether but meted out to prove she was capable of sacrifice. Pa and Joe had adored the sweetness of Mother’s puddings and cakes and devoured them without regret or guilt. Sugar had proved a seductive poison for Des; for her grandchildren it was the prize for eating their vegetables. Susan took hers in small amounts like Mother, but it was more about restraint than sacrifice. Peter shifted between gluttony and abstinence according to his willpower. Richard’s sugars were limited to those found primarily in fruit. Jane declined it, but with saliva on her tongue, and blind to the sugars in the wine.
For Grace, sweets were the reward of patience. With the weight of meat and the goodness of vegetables taken like medicine, the taste buds were allowed to relax around the simple pleasure of pudding.
Today she’d try to satisfy the sugar habits of all those around her family table. There was mango for the health conscious; cookies-and-cream ice cream for the children, because she could never deny a child their favourite; and then there was a simple, old-fashioned pudding from her past – baked custard. Mother would have thought this dish an ordinary one for a celebration, a pudding that showed little effort. Grace had chosen it, first, because it was one of the few she could still make from memory. But more importantly because of its simplicity, not just in preparation, but ingredients as well. Yesterday, she’d considered opening one of her recipe books to a page for a torte or flan or a fancy gateau, which some in her family might have preferred. But in the end she decided the modern tongue was rarely given the delicate pleasure of just three basic ingredients – egg, milk, sugar. Today’s baked custard paid homage to a lost era.
She thought of Pa as she placed the baked custard on the tray. He would have called it dirt pudding because of the nutmeg sprinkled across the top. She must tell Tom and Jaxon; they’d get a kick out of that.
Nick and Jorja were in the kitchen with Grace, rinsing the dishes Susan had cleared.
‘You’ll have to go and see them. They’re awesome,’ Nick said.
Their voices were a pleasant background noise after the orchestra of sound at a table of twelve. There, the falsettos competed against the baritones, and Jane’s alcohol-induced caterwauling periodically cut across them all like a cymbal.
‘Mum won’t let me go to concerts. Not until I’m sixteen.’
‘She’s probably right. But, hey, when you are, I’ll take you to see them.’
‘Sweet.’
Their talk moved next to the latest movies they’d seen. Grace started to polish the dessert spoons, content to remain on the outskirts of their conversation. It was a steady stream of popular culture, which required words like awesome and sweet to describe; modern derivatives of her children’s groovy and cool or her own beaut and bonza. They let their guard down with their parents absent from the room, and allowed the odd bullshit or wanker to slip into their talk as well. Maybe they thought she was awesome enough not to mind what they said.
Grace ran the tea towel over the curve of the next dessert spoon. She was pleased to see the metal could still be brought to a shine after the number of desserts it had brought to the many tongues that had licked it clean. She set the spoon on top of another on the tray, allowed the handles to spread out like Kath’s open fan. She took the next one from the pile on the bench and started to massage its curved surface between thumb and fingers with the cloth.
Like Nick and Jorja now, when Grace’s children were small they could easily ignore an adult audience, as they brought to life the fantasy worlds their imaginations created. They’d invited imaginary friends to staged tea parties, set up hospitals under bed-sheet roofs, or created jungle wildernesses behind potted plants. Claire had been the best at it. She could free up her inhibitions as readily as any actress on a stage, and provided the perfect voiceover for her make-believe friends and toy animals, granting them varying degrees of bliss or peril at a whim.
Watch out, there’s a hyena after you, she’d say to a plastic monkey as her small hand made it lope across the carpet, plastic dog chasing it in the other hand, or Quick Alice, hide! she’d breathe urgently to no one over her shoulder.
Grace listened to these adventures being played out as she went about her work, as keenly as she had listened to Blue Hills when it was broadcast on the radio. Staying tuned, as it were, for the next instalment of a young and creative mind happy to escape reality.
Grace had loved this motherly invisibility.
And she too knew an imaginary place, a dark and comfortable refuge she’d created, where she would breathe deeply of Claire and pretend she always could. To think of this place now, right or wrong, reminded her of Des.
One day their journey home from the beach was particularly hot, slow and uncomfortable. Each had salt-crusted and sunburnt skin that stuck to the vinyl car seats. Des hunkered over the wheel, muttered at various speeding drivers and braked regularly. Grace quietly drummed her fingers on the door’s armrest, the only outlet she had for her frustration. Searching for a new station on the car’s radio or increasing the volume was taboo, as was playing a game of I Spy. About the only game Des allowed was the one where each
competed against the other to see who could make their boiled lolly last the longest – a dull but quiet distraction, intended as much to keep the lolly tin full as to create calm.
Claire sat in her usual spot in the middle of the back seat. They each had an ice-cream cone, bought from a van before they left the beach. Peter had finished his quickly then kicked at the back of Grace’s seat as he fidgeted about, trying to get comfortable. Susan stroked her father’s shoulder as she licked hers. Claire, who declared ice cream her favourite thing of all, even though the icy cold gave her a headache, ate hers slowly. Watery trails of melted ice cream travelled down her cone. She tried to keep up with the flow, but in the heat of the car was hard pressed to do so.
The car laboured uphill and Des crunched the column shift down a gear, then turned to check his outside lane.
‘Claire, you’re making a bloody mess with that thing.’
‘I’m trying not to. But it’s melting quicker than I can eat it.’
‘Just hurry up and finish the thing or I’ll throw it out.’
‘But it makes my head hurt if I eat it quick.’
Grace rummaged round for a handkerchief in her bag but for once couldn’t find one. Claire licked fast like a kitten but still the melting ice cream beat her down the cone. She cupped it in both hands to stem the flow. Des cranked up a gear again, and risked quick looks into the rear-vision mirror from time to time to check her progress. ‘Finished that thing yet?’ he’d ask.
‘Nearly,’ she replied, but Grace could see she was a long way off.
Despite their ice-cream treat, Peter and Susan were tetchy in the heat.
‘Claire, keep your legs on your side.’
‘I can’t. Peter’s got his spread wide.’
‘Have not.’
‘Have so.’
‘Have n—’
‘That’s enough,’ Des bellowed.
‘Why don’t you let me drive, Des?’
‘Bloody women. Always tryin’ to put their men in the back seat.’
‘I’m only thinking of how tired you must be after the big day.’
‘I’m fine. Now quiet. I’m concentrating on the road.’
‘Cla-ire, shift your legs.’
‘I can’t.’ Claire took one hand off her cone to budge Susan’s leg back.
‘Get your sticky hands off me. And look you’ve dripped it all over the seat now. Da-ad, she’s making a mess.’
‘Am not.’ Claire clamped both hands on the cone again and wiggled her bottom across to hide the drips on the seat.
‘You have so. Look – here.’
‘Give it to me.’ Des risked a hand off the steering wheel and held it out to Claire.
‘Oh, Des. She’s trying to eat it as quickly as possible. It’s hot. Let her have it.’
‘Not if she’s makin’ a mess in the car with it. Come on – give it here before you cause an accident.’
Claire fought back tears as she passed the soggy cone to her father.
‘Here,’ he said, and thrust it towards Grace. ‘Wind your window down and throw it out.’
‘I’m not doing your dirty work.’
‘Well, I can’t. I’m drivin’.’
Grace took the cone from him, turned and handed it back to Claire. ‘I won’t throw a child’s ice cream out, not when they’ve done nothing wrong.’
Des mumbled something about who’d be cleaning the seat and hunkered back over the wheel. Quiet took hold in the car after that, leaving Des to focus on little more than his nerves.
Half an hour into the homeward journey and it was time for the first smoko stop. Grace was hopeful as Des pulled into a shallow lay-by off the highway that, having got this far, he might make it home without a second stop.
‘Can we get out, Daddy?’ Susan asked. ‘I’ve got sand in my togs.’
‘So long as you don’t bug me while I have me smoke.’
‘Keep on my side of the car,’ Grace called.
All three children filed out from the back, leaving lines of sand in the seams of the seat, which Grace thought made the ice-cream drips inconsequential. The children milled around Grace’s window, un-sticking swimming costumes and hooking sand out from seams and folds with their fingers. Des took up his post on the bonnet, tobacco tin on the hood beside him. With his back to them all, he gazed off into the scrub, plumes of smoke rising above his head. Grace wound down her window and turned up Elton John’s ‘Rocket Man’ on the radio. She rested her head on the seat back and hummed along, eyes closed. The children’s chatter and the passing of cars merged into white noise as she dozed.
‘In the car!’ Des called.
Grace was startled from her lull. She pulled herself upright.
Susan, shrewd enough to notice before he called that her father had almost finished his cigarette, was already at the car door.
‘I’m sitting behind Mum,’ she taunted, and got in behind Grace. She slammed the door on her victory and pushed down the lock.
‘That’s not fair. I had the sun on my face all the way to the beach and I’m not gonna have it all the way home as well.’ Peter stood beside Susan’s door, banging on the glass. ‘Lemme in.’ His fists worked at the glass. ‘Let – me – in!’
Susan poked her tongue out at Peter.
‘Come on, Peter. Hop round the other side, there’s a good lad. It’s not long now and we’ll be home.’
Peter ignored Grace, stood his ground, banging on the glass.
‘Come on. You can have first pick from the lolly tin. How’s that sound?’
‘I don’t want a lolly. I – want – my – seat!’
Claire stood on the driver’s side, ready to get in. ‘You can have the middle if you want, Peter.’
‘Don’t want the middle. Wanna sit behind Mum.’
‘I’ve had about as much of this as I can stand.’ Des got off the bonnet with more speed than Grace had seen in him all day.
Too quick for even Peter to rethink his tantrum, he got to the boy, grabbed him by the arm and man-handled him round the back of the car to the other side.
‘Out of the way, Claire. He can sit in the bloody middle now. That’ll teach him a lesson.’
Peter, whose indignation was poorly controlled at the best of times, thrashed about trying to wrench himself free from his father’s grip. Claire, seeing the tumultuous lashing of arms and legs coming her way, stepped back from the car to avoid being caught up in the fray.
Grace craned her neck round to follow the spectacle. ‘Des, just let him get in on his own,’ she pleaded. ‘And you can take that smirk off your face, young lady. You’re no little Miss Innocent in all of this.’
‘He deserved it. He’s a big bully.’
‘Dad’s the bully,’ Claire yelled at Susan. ‘And you’re a nasty girl who starts fights.’
‘Shut up, Claire,’ Des roared.
‘Yeah, shut up, Claire,’ Susan mimicked.
‘Des, please. Let him go.’
Tears of rage and frustration streaked Peter’s red face and snot bubbles glistened at his nostrils. But he never faltered in his determination to break free – equalled only by Des’s determination to best the boy.
‘Des, please. Claire, come back from the road.’
Almost to the open door by now, Peter gave one final frenzied scrabble, and lashed out with his un-pincered arm against Des’s grip. Des, losing any sense of control he might still have had, and with the superhuman strength of the enraged, swung Peter round by the arm, legs flying out as they did when he’d swing him by the hands, playfully, in the backyard. Grace, terrified, thought he meant to slam the boy into the side of the car.
‘Des! Stop it!’
Peter’s feet went wide and struck Claire full on in the chest, sending her reeling backwards. Her little face looked stunned by the blow as she stumb
led back on unsteady legs towards the road. Des and Peter were oblivious, so intent was each on victory, but Grace watched it all as if in slow motion.
Claire had no time to recover from the blow from her brother before she was hit by the oncoming car with such force that she was ripped from Grace’s view in an instant. Grace turned to watch her youngest child tumble and roll down the bitumen like a rag doll thrown from the window of a passing car.
‘Claire!’ she screamed, though she couldn’t hear herself, only the sound of blood pulsing in her ears.
In that moment Grace became two people – one who acted and one who observed as though from above. She saw herself scrabbling to open the car door and then slipping in the gravel in her flimsy sandals as she rushed to get to Claire, a misshapen bundle fifteen yards up the road. Grace the nurse ran but the other Grace, the one watching, didn’t want to arrive at her destination.
When nurse Grace got to her twisted and bloodied child, she knelt in the dust, felt for a pulse and put her ear close to Claire’s torn mouth to see if she was breathing. This Grace stuck a finger inside the bloodied cavity, hooked a tongue forward and cleared away tiny broken teeth.
The watching Grace was fearful to touch her child. She could see she’d already suffered enough pain and to lay a finger on her now, to hold her, would only add more.
Nurse Grace alternated between compressing the child’s chest and forcing short, sharp breaths into her damaged mouth. This Grace, the one with wide pupils and a clinician’s nerve, ignored the salty taste of blood on her lips.
Watching Grace knelt too and placed her hand on the crown of her child’s head, flinched at the boggy scalp she could feel under the blood-wet hair. ‘Claire?’ this other, watchful Grace whispered. ‘My beautiful little girl. What have they done to you?’
Nurse Grace kept working at heart and lungs as an uneasy and assorted collection of legs and shoes gathered around her to witness this pain between mother and child.
‘Has somebody gone to phone an ambulance?’ Grace demanded between frantic breaths and compressions.
