‘God, that’s awful.’
‘Kind of puts things into perspective, doesn’t it?’
‘Yeah,’ she said with a small, twisted smile.
I pressed the heels of my floury hands to my eyes. ‘He thought maybe I could tell whether she’s going to be alright.’
‘But no?’ she asked.
‘No. Psychic enough to be weird, but never enough to be useful.’
She came across the kitchen and gave me a self-conscious, one armed hug.
‘How are things with you, anyway?’ I asked.
‘Things’ll be just dandy as long as I eat two thousand calories a day.’
I sat up straight and looked at her, frowning. ‘Did Rob say that?’
She nodded.
‘Did you kick him?’
‘No. He was right.’
Well, yes, but . . . crikey.
She retreated to her lamingtons on the far side of the room. ‘Just – don’t watch me to see what I eat, okay?’ she said with her back to me.
I bit my lip, and then said, ‘Anna, I’m not going to be able to help it. I’ve been really worried.’
‘Well, you don’t need to be,’ she said shortly.
‘Do you still want me to be your bridesmaid?’ I asked, standing up and returning to my cheese scones.
‘Yes,’ she said, even more shortly, and neither of us spoke again for some time.
Chapter 18
The rest of that week felt slow and grey and arduous, like a swim through cold porridge.
Mum produced a potential barista, the daughter of a friend of a neighbour’s aunt, who spent half a morning propped against the pantry door before saying she didn’t think she’d take the job. Hell would have frozen over before we’d have offered it to her, but we were so relieved not to have to say so (thus offending the neighbour, her aunt and her aunt’s friend) that we put on our very best devastated-yet-understanding expressions and paid her forty dollars for two hours of getting in the way.
Anna added raw almonds and the occasional slice of cheese to her diet, which was at least a step in the right direction.
We missed the deadline for putting an ad in that week’s local paper, but even without an extra person our workload, now we had become more of a bakery than a restaurant, had gone from insane to merely hectic.
On Friday night we had a barbecue in honour of Brendon Lynch, home briefly from London. It turned into one of those parties that are more amusing to reminisce over than they were to experience (the ‘Remember that night when Lily Smith threw up on the pavlova?’ ‘That was the same night you fell off the roof, wasn’t it?’ sort). I drank enough beer to spoil Saturday entirely, and to have a long and incoherent argument with Brendon about predestination versus free will, but I never got drunk enough to enjoy myself.
On Sunday morning Anna looked up from the carrot cake she was icing and said, ‘Lia, why don’t you text him?’
‘I can’t,’ I said, hunting through the big chest freezer.
‘Of course you can. Just ask how things are going. Or say you hope everything’s alright.’
‘I can’t. I don’t have his number.’ And also I’d rather have cut off my right arm and fed it to a shark than pestered the man with trite little bids for his attention. ‘This is bloody ridiculous; we’ve got kilos of blanched almonds.’
‘They’re on the second shelf down in the pantry. What do you mean you don’t have his number?’
‘I don’t mean anything. I just don’t have his number.’
Anna said nothing, with what I felt at the time to be most unnecessary emphasis. It’s just possible that I was being a tad hypersensitive.
* * *
On Monday night, six days after Tracey’s accident, I remembered the brake pads and took my car down to Monty’s workshop. It was nearly eight when I got there and I expected to leave a note on the dashboard and the keys on top of the driver’s-side sun visor, in accordance with tradition, but as I rounded the back of the building Monty peered, meerkat-like, over the roof of a gleaming black Range Rover.
I parked the car against the back fence and went to talk to him.
‘What can I do for you, Miss Lia?’ he asked.
‘Jed told me to bring the car down and get you to put in new brake pads. I think he’s ordered them.’
Monty looked harassed, most unusually for him. ‘They’ll be around somewhere, then. I haven’t got time to do it tomorrow; I’ve got this thing’s owner breathing down my neck. Can you leave your car here for a day or two? Or tell you what, Lia; leave it at my place and I’ll bring it down in the morning.’
I shook my head. They say exercise is good for improving your outlook on life, and heaven knew mine could do with an upgrade. ‘Thanks, but I think I’ll leave it now and walk home. Have you heard how Jed’s wife is?’
He looked at me curiously. ‘You know about that, do you?’
‘Mm. He was at the café when he got a call to say that she was hurt.’
‘And you know what happened?’
I nodded, and then added, when he looked doubtful, ‘That she jumped off a bridge under the influence of drugs and mania combined, you mean?’
Monty sighed the relieved sigh of a gossip authorised, after days of painful and unusual discretion, to discuss a truly first-rate story. ‘That’s the one,’ he said. ‘Terrible thing.’
‘I haven’t heard anything since – is she okay?’
‘They’ve had her in an induced coma for nearly a week, but she woke up today and said something,’ he said.
‘Oh, thank goodness.’
He made a face. ‘I suppose so. Although you can’t help thinking it would have solved a lot of problems if she’d picked something higher to jump off.’
I smiled, not because it was funny but from relief that such a horrible thought should have crossed someone else’s mind besides my own.
‘From what I hear, the woman’s a complete nightmare,’ he said.
‘She’s not well,’ I pointed out.
‘I know that. But not everyone with a mental illness is a nice person.’
This must be true, of course, but somehow it had never occurred to me. You feel sorry for people with disabilities; you don’t go around liking or disliking them as if they were normal. A position, now I came to think of it, as insulting as it was stupid. It’s always disconcerting to realise that you’re not as broad-minded and undiscriminating as you thought you were.
‘No,’ I said slowly. ‘But you sort of have to give her the benefit of the doubt, don’t you? You don’t know whether she’s a nightmare by nature or if she can’t help it.’
‘Blowed if I know,’ Monty said, polishing a smear on the Range Rover’s roof with the sleeve of his overalls. ‘I suspect it doesn’t make a lot of difference when you’re on the receiving end. I’d like to see Jed move up here permanently.’
‘He won’t,’ I said glumly.
He looked at me sideways. ‘You seem to know an awful lot about it.’
I felt my face get warm, and hoped it would pass unnoticed in the rosy sunset light. ‘I don’t, really,’ I said. ‘But Ratai’s too far away from Thames for them to share custody of Craig.’
‘There’s not going to be any sharing of custody for a while, I wouldn’t think.’
‘No, but even if the courts, or the mental health service, or whoever it is that makes these decisions, gave him sole custody, I just don’t think Jed’s the kind of bloke who’d take his mentally ill wife’s child to live somewhere three hours away from her.’
There was a short, depressed pause.
‘Who’s to say she can’t move away from Thames, too?’ said Monty.
‘Her parents are there.’
‘So’s her dealer,’ he said.
An excellent point. ‘Hey, that’s true,’ I said, smiling like a sunbeam.
* * *
That night the wind changed. We had three days of howling easterlies that turned the sea to a sort of mud-coloured jellyfis
h soup, and two inches of rain. The café was inundated with displaced beachgoers who wanted leisurely brunches over the paper but got high-speed coffee and sandwiches. Not the dining experience we were aiming to provide, but hey, it was lucrative.
Just before lunchtime on Thursday I was piling hot cheese scones into a basket beside the coffee machine with more haste than precision when someone on the other side of the counter said over the general racket, ‘You’re a mess, woman. You’re covered in flour.’
I looked up, saw Brendon Lynch and smiled. ‘I could be covered in much worse things.’
‘Hold still,’ he said, reaching across the counter to take a swipe at my cheek with the side of his thumb. ‘Better. Marginally.’
‘Thank you. Lovely to see you, but I can’t talk now.’
‘I can see that. What are you doing tonight?’
‘Cooking. Cleaning. Maybe some sleep if I’m lucky, but I’m not getting my hopes up. Tell you what; come back at six and hang out for a bit while we prep for tomorrow.’
‘Okay,’ he said, and I whirled away to fling my oven tray into the sink and get back to the till.
* * *
He returned that evening in the middle of a nasty little horizontal shower of rain, though he went unnoticed until he hammered on the locked French doors. I turned off the food processor and ran to let him in.
‘Yuck,’ he said, shaking himself like a dog. ‘It’s supposed to be summer. The weather’s better in London.’
‘When are you flying out?’ I asked.
‘Sunday morning. Back to work on Monday.’
‘That’ll be fun, with jet lag.’
Brendon grinned. He was a little guy, whippet-thin and tanned mahogany, with delicate, finely drawn features and a shaved head. ‘No worse than any other Monday, coming down from whatever I was on in the weekend.’
‘Isn’t it about time you knocked that sort of carry-on on the head?’ I said, frowning.
‘Square,’ said Brendon, waving at Anna, who had just answered the phone.
I led the way into the kitchen. ‘Beer? Coffee? Grab yourself something to eat out of the cabinet.’
‘Got any green tea? I’m off caffeine.’
I raised my eyebrows. ‘So recreational drugs are fine, but caffeine’s bad for your health?’
‘You’ve got to draw a line somewhere, Lia,’ he said.
‘Mum . . .’ Anna said tiredly into the phone. ‘No, I never said that, I just –’
‘What’s that?’ Brendon asked, wandering over to look into the food processor.
‘Shortbread,’ I said, dropping a teabag into a mug and flicking the kettle on.
‘Yum.’
‘I know. It always seems such a pity to cook it.’ I detached the food processor bowl from the machine and tipped the contents onto the butcher’s block.
‘Can I lick the bowl?’ asked Brendon.
I passed it over as Anna said, ‘Look, I haven’t got time for this right now. I’ll talk to you later . . . Yes. Okay. Goodnight.’ She put the phone down, hard. ‘Hi, Brendon.’
‘Bad day at the office?’ he asked.
‘Mothers,’ she said darkly.
‘Has she found another sixteen cousins that need inviting to the wedding?’ I asked.
‘She’s not sure there should be a wedding.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘That’s new.’
‘Apparently a bride-to-be should be more radiant. I’m not happy enough; she thinks it’s my subconscious telling me something’s wrong.’
‘Either that or your subconscious is telling you you’re tired and you won’t get a day off for another two months.’
Anna sat down on a stool and rested her forehead against the cool granite bench top. ‘Wine,’ she said. ‘I need wine.’
I felt this was a good sign – wine, after all, contains calories.
Legend that he was, Brendon cleaned the dining room while we cooked, and it was only five past seven when Anna slid tomorrow’s chickens into the oven and I flung my dishcloth into the sink. ‘Done,’ I said.
‘Pub?’ Brendon asked.
Anna shook her head, but I said recklessly, ‘Sounds good. Give me thirty seconds to get changed.’
The rain had stopped and scraps of blue and apricot-coloured sky were appearing between the clouds as we drove down the hill into town. The hawkweed and long grass on the roadside had been beaten flat by the weather, but the manuka sparkled, starred with tiny white flowers and glittering raindrops.
‘Hotel or surf club?’ I asked.
‘Surf club, I reckon,’ said Brendon, skirting a large puddle halfway along the esplanade. ‘Haven’t been there for years. Is Laurie King still the manager?’
‘No! He left his wife for Rae Needham about this time last year, and they moved to Hokitika.’
‘Why Hokitika?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe just because it’s a good long way away from Mrs King . . . Hey, would you mind if we went to the hotel after all?’
Brendon, who was just turning into the surf club car park, looked at me enquiringly.
‘That’s Isaac Harper’s car,’ I explained, pointing across the wet expanse of gravel.
‘Who’s he?’
‘Dark hair, olive skin, used to live at the top of North Street – remember? He was friends with Jonathon Bateup at school.’
‘Yeah, I remember. So what?’
‘I’d just rather not run into him. We went out for a little while six months ago, and it didn’t end all that well.’
Brendon pulled up right beside Isaac’s car. ‘Jeez, toughen up, woman,’ he said. ‘No relationship ends well.’
‘Yeah, well, the last time I saw him he called me a slut and someone knocked him down.’ And as he cut the engine, ‘I’m not going in there!’
Brendon looked at me, sighed and restarted his car. ‘Fine,’ he said, backing out of his parking space.
‘Thank you,’ I said meekly. You can afford to be meek when you’ve won your point.
‘Who knocked him down for you? His replacement?’
I tucked a loose curl behind my ear. ‘Maybe. Potentially.’
‘You’re a shocker,’ he said, turning out onto the main street.
‘This coming from you? Really?’ In high school Brendon’s love-life followed a cyclical pattern, like the march of the seasons. He’d have a girlfriend, and then get another one, and then they’d find out about each other and he’d be – temporarily – back to none.
‘Takes one to know one.’ He parked on the roadside fifty metres up from the hotel, and as we walked back along the pavement he said thoughtfully, ‘Wasn’t it Isaac Harper who shat himself on Rhys’s sofa after the Pearl Jam concert?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Yuck.’
‘You’re not wrong. Well, well. So you’ve been playing hide-the-salami with ol’ Zac the Shitter. Pickings must be slim.’
‘Brendon, shut up.’
‘Wow. Awesome comeback.’
I ignored that, since I couldn’t think of a crushing yet dignified retort.
‘Hey, I’m not judging, we all make the odd horrible mistake,’ he said. ‘How long did you go out with him for?’
‘A couple of months. Not long.’
‘A couple of months?’
‘Not long by normal people’s standards, I meant.’
‘Lia and Za-ac, up a tree –’
‘What are you, eight?’ I demanded.
‘K – I – S – S –’
I shoved him, and he shoved me back. It was only a gentle shove, Brendon being a chivalrous soul, but I tripped over the edge of a paving stone and fell sideways against a streetlamp.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘You okay?’
‘Fine.’
‘Good. Lia and Za-ac –’
Pushing off the lamppost I made a flying tackle and got him in a headlock. He writhed and twisted with all the breath he had spare from laughing, but I fought Rob most days for the first sixteen or so years of my life, and I�
��m quite hard to detach. I was clinging to his back with one arm around his neck, beating him over the head with my handbag (which was made of nice soft suede and contained only a wallet and a cardigan, so wasn’t really as vicious as it sounds), when Jed drove past in a green Subaru station wagon.
Startled both by his presence in the district and the speed and certainty with which I’d recognised him, on a murky evening and in an unfamiliar car, I slid hastily to my feet. Having the man you like surprise you grappling with someone else is never ideal, but you just might brush through it if your instinctive reaction is a wide, happy smile of greeting. Mine was a shocked stare. I couldn’t have looked guiltier if I’d tried.
‘What’s wrong?’ Brendon asked as the station wagon disappeared around the corner.
I jumped, having forgotten all about him. ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Um, broke a nail.’
Chapter 19
We found Lily and Adam Smith at the hotel, and had mediocre hamburgers and excellent chips with them at a corner table overlooking the churning grey sea. It was a fine way to spend an evening, and it saddens me to recall that instead of enjoying the company of my friends I devoted about ninety per cent of my attention to worrying about that stupid episode on the pavement outside.
‘. . . Hello? Anyone home?’
I looked up from scratching patterns in a puddle of tomato sauce with a toothpick to find Brendon waving at me across the table. ‘Sorry, what was that?’
‘Do you want another drink?’
‘No thanks. Actually, I think I’d better call it a night. Busy day tomorrow and all that.’
‘Dessert?’ Adam suggested.
‘No, I’m good.’
‘Look, Lily, they’ve got pavlova,’ Brendon said brightly.
‘Shut up,’ she said.
I started to collect my things, and Brendon said, ‘I’ll give you a lift home.’
‘No. No, honestly, I’ve got to duck round to Mum’s for a minute and grab something. She’ll drop me home. Goodnight, guys, great to see you. Come home again soon, Brendon, won’t you?’
Five minutes later I was walking along the esplanade in the grey twilight, a couple of thousand sparrows squabbling above me as they settled down for the night. The further I went the more doubtful I felt about the wisdom of this little mission, and by the time I’d made my way along Green Street to Mum’s place most of my courage had oozed away.
The Pretty Delicious Cafe Page 14
