by Tracy Farr
Marti knows the ratios off by heart. Five eggs is her standard recipe, but she can scale it to four eggs, or six or ten, as the occasion demands. She can make it in her sleep. Just flour, eggs and sugar. Magic. Perfect. But the thing is, if it’s not quite perfect when it comes out of the oven – uneven, or broken, a little under- or over-cooked – you can’t really go wrong with those good, basic ingredients. And there’s no imperfection that can’t be masked by cream and jam; or booze, custard and fruit. And more booze.
Iris (Marti had told her: Be my kitchen bitch, Rice) has found and unpacked the old rotary beater, the wooden spoon, the whisk. She’s unpacked mixing bowls and the conical metal baking measure. Inside the cake tin’s base she’s fitted a circle of brown paper, cut from the bakery bag the pastries came in.
Marti measures sugar, whisks flour in a bowl to sift it. She separates eggs, slides the whites into a big mixing bowl. Each yolk she leaves cupped in its own half shell, all six of them resting on the table, each rocking gently until it find its balance.
‘One for each of us.’ Iris nudges the eggshell closest to her, and it wobbles then rights itself, stable again.
‘Hmm?’
‘The eggs. You, me. Kurt and Lu. Paulie and Kris.’
Marti screws her mouth up. ‘What about the baby?’
‘The whole cake’s for her.’
Marti beats the egg whites with the rotary beater, working up a sweat. She tips in sugar – beats – then a little more; then more. She rests the beater against the side of the bowl, looks up at Iris, grins, wipes her forehead.
‘Jesus, quite the workout.’ She grabs the flesh of her upper arm, judders it. ‘Got the bingo wings going.’
‘Fadoobadahs.’
‘They’re like slabs of pork. All ready to roast. Slice me and coat me with olive oil, rub salt into my wounds.’
‘Marti, you’re not roast pork, you’re ham.’
Iris reaches out, rubs her right hand on Marti’s arm, at the top.
‘And I love your arms. They’re like an old sofa –’
‘Iris!’
‘No, no, I mean they’re lovely. Soft. Velvety.’
She stands up and hugs Marti, then releases her and stands next to her, one arm around Marti’s shoulders. Iris is shorter than Marti – not much, just enough to have to reach up to reach across her shoulder. She leans her head on Marti’s shoulder, smells cigarettes light on her skin and clothes – not stale, not unpleasant, just the smell of Marti.
‘We’re a couple of old sofas, Marti love. Soft and pink.’
‘We’re comfortable.’
‘We’re luscious.’
‘We’re sink-into-able.’
‘We are.’
‘Oh, Rice. I don’t want to be a sofa.’ Marti’s mock-sad, joking, but she sounds as if she means it, at least a little.
‘You’re a lovely sofa. Quality. Mid-century modern. We shouldn’t be stick insects at our age, anyway.’
‘Kristin’s a stick insect.’
‘Kristin’s half our bloody age, and lives on seeds and nuts. Of course she’s a stick insect.’
They hear Kristin’s voice from the other room. Marti mugs, wide-eyed, to Iris – shhh! – a floury finger to her lips. They giggle like girls. Marti tips a gold yolk from its shell into the bowl, mixes, adds the next, and the next, until all six yolks are combined. She folds the flour in, turning it lightly and gently with the wooden spoon to bring the mixture together. Then she tips it into the tin, pale yellow flowing to cover the brown paper.
Marti picks up the cake tin in both hands, and holds it in front of her at chest height. Then she moves her hands apart and lets the tin drop to the table: getting the air out, settling the mixture. Iris opens the oven door, Marti picks up the cake and slides it inside, and Iris closes the door on it.
Everyone’s ready to go for a drive. All of them, except Iris, are going, glad to get out of the house, into the sun. But Marti makes them wait until she’s taken the cake from the oven. She doesn’t trust Iris to judge it.
‘Gas ovens are tricky. The moisture. The heat. You’ve got to get it just right. Leave it to the expert.’
They all stand and watch. Marti takes the cake from the oven, assesses it, touches her finger gently to the cake’s surface. She nods, kicks the oven door up with her foot to close it. She slips a plate over the cake tin, inverts them, turns the cake out onto the plate. Perfect. She places a rack over the bottom of the cake, inverts the lot – plate, cake, rack – and lifts the plate off, puts the cake on its rack in the middle of the table. She opens her arms, jazz hands, shimmies.
‘Ta-daah!’
They all applaud. Paul jingles his keys.
‘The famous Marti Sponge! Nice one, sis. Right, we good to go now?’
Iris herds them out the front door, the five of them and the baby. She leans in the doorway watching them, her hand held over her eyes to shade them from the sun. Car doors bang. Luce sits in the back of Paul and Kristin’s car, next to the baby. Kurt’s with Marti. Motors start. Gravel crunches under tyres. As the car pulls away, Luce lifts her hand, presses fingers to the window. Her fingertips are white pads on the glass, like the underside of a chameleon, or a salamander, or a frog. Iris lifts her hand, waves her fingers to the backs of the cars, to Luce’s pale face in the dark frame of the window.
When they’re gone, she stands in the doorway, and soaks up the sun and the quiet.
Iris cleans up after the cake, after Marti. She washes and dries and repacks the beater, the whisk, the bowls and the wooden spoon, the cake tin. She sweeps the six empty half eggshells from the table into a bowl, then wipes the table. The cake, on its rack, sits in the centre, fragrant with eggs and sweetness, still cooling.
Standing at the sink, she carefully cleans the eggshells. She runs water over them, slides her fingers on their satin silky insides to remove membrane. The feel of them: the chalk-rough of their outside, the glide of their inside, so strong and so fragile all at once. The look of them: the smooth of the curve of the egg, the sharp of the broken edge; inside and outside at the same time.
When they’re all clean, she wipes the halfshells dry and puts them in a line on the windowsill, where the sun – when its angle is right – will catch them, and light will shine through them. She lets the shells settle and find their balance: all on the same ground, each facing in a different direction.
To the lighthouse
The car shoots down a road edged by trees that’re tall and straight, like light poles, but for giants. The trunks are bright orange-red, as if painted for safety. The trees make a wall you can’t see past. At their tops (the canopy, they learned that in Ecology) they reach across the road and almost touch, high above them. Luce puts her head back, looks out the back window at the world the wrong way up. The sun’s out, but everything’s still soaking, the road steaming, trees dripping. Luce presses the button and the window glass moves down, widens the gap, lets in damp fresh air.
Kristin’s driving, the seat pushed back so far that Luce, behind her in the back seat, has to angle her legs and wedge them in place. In the back seat of the car, behind Paul and next to Luce, the baby’s asleep in its backwards-facing pod, its hand clutched tight around Luce’s finger.
She can’t see Kristin in front of her, on the other side of the huge leather seat. She can just see the side of Paul – the side of his face as he turns to Kristin, his hands as they fiddle with his phone. She can’t hear them properly, but they’re talking to each other, anyway, not to her, as if they’ve forgotten she’s there. Kristin says something about Iris, and boxes. Paul says Mrs Ramsay, something something; and he says something about the lighthouse, and Kristin laughs.
Luce wants to go to the lighthouse, but she’s been outvoted.
‘Nah, we’ll find that new winery. With the art gallery. Barry’s stepdaughter’s the manager. He told me how to get there the back way.’
Paul has his phone in his hand. He holds the screen out towards Kristin, and
Luce can see it between the big leather seats, the blue flashing dot that’s them moving closer to the upside-down teardrop on the map.
‘I dropped a pin to mark it. Barry said you take this back road.’
He pinches and swipes to zoom and pan, all proud of himself.
‘I sent the pin thingy from the map to Kurt, so he’s got it on his phone. We can just meet them there. They’re amazing, these things, aren’t they. Don’t know what we’ d do without them, eh Luce.’
He leans around and looks back at her for a moment, grinning, winking a big comedy uncle wink as he swipes and clicks the bright tiny screen.
‘Should be a road off to the right, but it’s a way ahead. Just go straight for now.’
He settles back in his seat, and she can’t see the phone in his hand any more.
She remembers the lighthouse. They went there only once, that she can remember. She was little – so was Kurt, but he always seemed like a big boy to her – and her dad had to carry her part of the way, up the path and the steps to the lighthouse. She remembers a sunny day, hot cars, stopping for an ice-cream from the shop. She remembers all of them – Iris and Paul and Kurt, and her and her mum and her dad – and the two cars, like today. The two of them, she and Kurt, always wanted to ride together, so they’ d go out in one car, and come back in the other. She remembers sticky ice-cream hands, and her mum not having anything to wipe them with so she put Luce’s hands in her mouth – one at a time; one whole hand, then the other – and gobbled them clean. It was their silly game, the python swallows its prey, her mother’s mouth tight and slick and warm around her hands, sucking gently.
Luce sticks the tip of her finger in her mouth now, sucks hard. She remembers standing at the base of the lighthouse, that day, and craning her head back to look up, but she couldn’t see the top. Her dad lifted her up on his shoulders, said now she was as tall as a lighthouse. Then he lifted her down and swung them around, turning circles til they were dizzy.
There are two photos of them from that day. In both, Luce is on her dad’s shoulders, right at the foot of the lighthouse. In the first, she’s leaning down, holding both of her little hands over his eyes, peek-a-boo. Her face is leaning down at the side of his, so she can see him, not seeing. In the other photo, he has his hands up in her armpits, tickling her, and her head is thrown back with laughter, pure joy. Off at the side of the photo, not quite complete, her mother’s face watches them.
His Auntie Marti is waving her arms as she talks, as she always does. She mostly keeps one hand on the steering wheel. She keeps turning towards Kurt, in the passenger seat next to her, to make eye contact as she speaks. She can’t help herself. He turns his head and looks back through the rear window, and he can see the front of Paul and Kristin’s car, tiny in the distance behind them, coming in and out of shadow as it moves through the trees. Kurt turns back to face front. He stares out through the windscreen, keeps his eyes on the road dead ahead, as if he can steer the car, keep it on track for her.
His phone beeps quietly, vibrates in his hand. He swipes and taps. A message from his dad.
Map point for café and gallery attached. Meet you there, chief. Over and out.
Kurt taps, saves, taps again to bring up the map screen. There they are, a blue dot moving, pulsing. He taps again, hits send.
Got it. See you there.
Marti laughs like a drain at something he hasn’t heard her say. He stares out at the road ahead, keeping them safe.
‘Yep, they’ve got it. They’ll see us there. See, that’s the beauty of it. All this technology. It allows you to be so flexible. Spontaneous.’
Kristin reaches out with her left hand and pats Paul’s knee. That’s all Luce can see in the gap between the leather seats: the slim hand with a gold ring, pat pat pat then resting on dark denim.
Then Kristin looks back over her shoulder at the baby – checking her; Luce has seen her do this a hundred times each day – and her eyes catch Luce, and her mouth makes an O of surprise. Kristin turns back to face front, but she fixes her eyes on Luce in the rearview mirror.
‘Luce! For a moment I forgot you were there.’
Paul’s phone beeps. A message flashes.
‘Oh crap. No signal.’
Kurt’s phone beeps, and he takes his eyes from the road. A message flashes up on the screen.
No signal.
He flicks to the map screen. No pulsing dot. The teardrop pin is fixed on the centre of the screen, but the map – the lines of the map, the meaning of it – has gone blank. They’re on their own.
‘Ah, shit, the map’s –’
His phone beeps again. The message disappears. The five vertical bars at the top of the screen go solid, one after another, from the shortest to the tallest, like climbing a hill. The blue dot that is them flashes again, pulses, moves along the lines on the screen that map the road ahead of them.
‘What, love?’
‘Never mind. We’re good.’
The road turns a corner, then straightens out before the crossroad ahead. He looks back through the rear window. He thinks he can just see Paul and Kristin’s car, a tiny flash in the sun on the road behind them.
He looks down at the pulsing blue dot, the thick line joining them to the teardrop pin. He looks up at the road, checks that it matches.
‘Go left at the crossroad, then veer right at the fork straight after that.’
Marti takes the right hand fork in the road.
Kristin takes the left hand fork in the road. She indicates to turn, even though there are no other cars.
Paul’ d remembered the first turn, left at the crossroad, but at the fork, he’ d gone blank. Kristin pulled over and idled on the side of the road while Paul climbed out and walked around, waving his phone in the air, trying to get some signal. He’ d climbed back into the car seat, huffing and sighing.
‘They could’ve waited.’
‘Well, just try to remember the map. Close your eyes, think of it.’
Paul’ d finally lifted his hands in the air and waved them both in parallel towards the left hand fork, like the cabin crew on a plane indicating the exits.
‘We go left. I’m certain. And we’re bound to get signal again as we drive, anyway. Probably once we’re out of the trees.’
So they’ d taken the left hand fork in the road; and here they are, driving on through the trees.
The road is sealed at first, then it starts to narrow, and the big trees give way – quite suddenly – to low scrub, to tea-tree and banksia, then they’re bumping along a sandy track, the grey-green low-growing trees scraping against the side of the car. Paul holds his phone up the whole time, waves it about, trying to recapture the map.
‘This isn’t right, Paul. We should turn back.’
‘Nah, this has got to be it. Barry said the track’s a bit ratty.’
Kristin just sighs, and keeps driving.
The baby squawks, next to Luce, waves her hands about as if conducting an orchestra. Luce puts her finger out, wiggles it in front of the baby. The baby grabs onto her, and pulls Luce’s finger to her mouth. She sucks, warm and wet, and Luce feels the little pull of it like a string to her heart.
They continue down the road, even when it becomes nothing more than a sandy track until, finally, they drive up over a dune and emerge out of scrub, almost at the sea.
Marti pulls the car into the carpark between the winery building and the gallery. Kurt checks his phone is on, and they’ve got coverage – they have – and pockets it as they walk across the gravel, following the blackboard signs advertising TASTINGS, to the cellar door.
The track ends in a sandy clearing, roughly circular, surrounded by low scrubby trees. Kristin stops the car, lets the engine idle a little before she pulls on the handbrake and turns the motor off. They sit in the car, at the end of the track, and stare out the windows. Light patches dot the perimeter of the clearing, where tracks lead off up and over to the beach, or to snugs in the dunes. Luce winds down the
window. She can hear the booming waves on the other side of the dunes, and smell their salt.
It’s a picnic area, or a drinking spot, used for camping or fishing, or all of the above. The remains of a campfire mark the centre of the clearing. Stones – burnt over and over again – edge the firepit, contain a slush of ashes and bottles, charred coals and empty cans. They spill outwards on one side where the stones have been dislodged, breaking the circle.
Luce leans on the sill of the car window, watches Paul walk up to the firepit. He kicks a can, then kicks a bottle, and Luce hears them roll. He kicks again, and releases the smell of campfires and burning, of charcoal heavy after the rain.
The baby whimpers, then sucks in her breath, then releases a wail that fills the car and threatens to break it apart. Luce opens the car door and scrambles out onto the sand. Her bare feet break through a light crust, then a thin sponge of damp on top of fine, dry powder, with the sticky feel of salt.
‘Shush shush, Baby.’
Kristin unclicks herself from the driver’s seat, walks around the car to the back and opens the door, leans in and unclips the baby. She lifts the baby out, unzipping her jacket as she does it, lifting her t-shirt, all at once, as if she’s got four hands. Kristin walks to Luce’s side of the car, the baby already nudging against her. Luce sees a flash of white skin, the roundness of Kristin – a thread of something, is it spit? – as the baby lifts away for a moment. Then the baby nestles back into her, and Kristin backs into the back seat of the car, where Luce had sat. Kristin waves at Luce. Luce looks away. She puts her head down, and walks to the other side of the clearing, past Paul, still kicking cans and waving his phone in the air.
Kurt watches his aunt tap carefully at her phone. She holds up the screen when she’s done.
Don’t know where you’ve got to!
K and I at winery.
Meet u back at house.
We’ll bring wine/bubbles/champers.
