by Phyllis King
By the time Nola Bruce arrived, I was skipping with nervous anticipation. I was a drag addict, about to get my best-ever hit.
I sat her down at my work-station by the staff room door, being extra careful not to brash against her accidentally. I didn’t want to spoil the effect for later. I couldn’t afford the slightest chance that her claws of bitterness would attack me before I was ready. I didn’t want any distractions. Nola Brace’s happiness was all that mattered.
After our initial greetings, I sent her off to the basin with Amy for an extra long shampoo. She loved the new conditioning mask and massage that followed. I made one of her favourite flavoured lattes and popped in my special ingredient. I even served it on a paper doily with three pink sugared almonds off to the side.
Comb in hand, I braced for the hit of bitterness and despair that was thankfully muffled to more of an ache by the residue left behind by glee. I wound the setting rollers in record time and watched her take the first few sips of the slightly cool latte. Nola Bruce didn’t like her coffee too hot. She liked to be able to drink it straight away.
Hint: An invaluable People Skill is remembering the small things about someone, such as how they take their coffee. It makes them feel special.
She finished her latte just as I lowered the overhead dryer. Her cheeks were a little flushed, so I asked Amy to make another cool coffee. I took my time rinsing and neutralising the first cup in hydrogen peroxide before accidentally smashing it to pieces on the cement tile floor.
It was while I was sweeping up the ceramic shards that the commotion began. Amy was calling me. It only took a few seconds to stuff the broken pieces of the cup under a pile of hair in the rubbish bin. But those few seconds were worth it.
By the time I reached Nola Bruce and flung back the overhead dryer, she was hyperventilating. I clasped her hands in mine, drinking in every ounce of fear, confusion and my old enemy, bitterness. I clenched down on my tongue and crunched my teeth together as the cattle brand attacked. I was determined not to let go. The morphing, burning claws were at odds with the freezing ice vest of terror that wrapped itself around my torso. Bull ants fought for running space over my scalp and a blanket of sopping wet sadness suddenly dropped me to my knees.
Nola Bruce was choking, ripping her hands from mine to grasp at her throat, then chest. She slipped from the chair as I frantically reached for her again, needing the physical contact to fully succeed. Her eyes bulged at me, condemning and hateful, realising exactly what I had done. She began to shake and then jerk like a landed fish. I held her tight, gasping in agony at the violence of the pins and needles stabbing my hands.
Then it just lifted.
Her accusing eyes softened as all the violence leached out, leaving only sadness behind. Her contorted mouth slipped into a twisted smile. I’m sure she whispered thank you through rose-coloured lips.
As Nola Bruce’s life slipped away, so too did her sadness. The garment of soaking towels began to quiver and flicker. It rose from my skin and separated into tiny individual pieces. Fluttering gently at first, the butterflies finally took flight. They encompassed and surrounded me. They tickled and invaded. They flew through me, deep inside like none had ever done before. The butterflies I felt that day were stronger than any others, just as I knew they would be. They were more than happy; they were euphoric, blissful, ecstatic.
They were gone.
It had only taken a few seconds for me to reach inside Nola Bruce and finally find her happiness. A few seconds for her to die. There was no question in the Paramedics’ minds when they eventually arrived: she was just another elderly lady whose heart had given out. Their tender hands of sympathy stroked my arm as they wheeled her body out the door.
It was then that I knew I was safe. They had no idea who Nola Bruce really was. She had gone by the name Nola Anne Longford-Bruce in her younger years. In those days she was an infamous killer, having poisoned both her husband and young son with potassium cyanide. She had claimed it was an accident, that her husband, a jeweller, must have left the cleaning product in the kitchen. She believed the fine white crystals to be sugar. The jury didn’t believe her defence, that she hadn’t noticed the pungent smell of bitter almonds as she sprinkled a little cyanide onto their porridge every morning.
She spent 22 years in jail.
The press at the time had branded her a cold-blooded murderer. I knew better. Nola Bruce was happy now, at peace with her long-gone family.
I love hairdressing. I love that I can sit someone in my chair and change their life forever. I love that I can always give them what they need, even if they didn’t know it themselves.
My strength is in my People Skills.
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Kitchens Can Be Dangerous
Ronda Bird
You could say the kitchen is the centre of the home, couldn’t you. Things happen in kitchens. Breakfast happens there, doesn’t it? People eat their toast, Corn Flakes, Weet-Bix. Scramble or boil their eggs. Fry bacon. Brew coffee, or tea. Pour juice from plastic bottles or cardboard cartons. Cook dinners at night. Prepare vegetables. Make puddings or cakes. Gaze out the windows, watch the passing traffic if their kitchen is at the front of the house. Ours isn’t - at the front, I mean. It’s at the back of the house, with a door out to the garden and the garage.
Even in small kitchens people do those things. Even if they are rushing off to work, or to school. And if they don’t have a table to sit down at they perch on stools at the breakfast bar, or nibble their toast as they rush around.
Ours is a big kitchen, with an enormous wooden table at one end, chairs, walk-in pantry, wall and floor cupboards, lots of work surfaces, and there’s still plenty of space all round. All Mum’s doing, of course. I think she needed the feeling at home of the big restaurant kitchens she’d worked in, needed that ambience, that professionalism that she so enjoyed at work. She’s a chef, you see. No, not just a cook, a chef, a real chef. Like Gordon Ramsay, except she doesn’t use the f word.
She had all the right qualifications from leading cooking establishments here and overseas, she had first-class experience in top restaurants in London, Paris and Milan. Then she met my Dad, came back to Australia with him, and continued working as a chef till I came along.
But Dad died when I was five. He was only 33, and I’ve since learned that he had a particularly virulent form of cancer which spread very quickly, though all I remember about it was that my adored Daddy was very sick, and then suddenly he’d ‘gone to heaven to be with some other angels’.
I missed... miss him terribly; and maybe Mum did too -missed a husband, I mean - because three years later she married Ricky.
There was something about him I didn’t like, right from the time he and Mum began to see a lot of each other.
‘You’re just a child,’ Mum said one day when I’d yelled at her that I didn’t like him. ‘It’s understandable, Angie Darling. You still miss Daddy, don’t you? I do too, course I do. But he wouldn’t want you or me to be unhappy, would he? And Ricky’s a nice man. Like your Daddy, Ricky wants us to be happy again. Once you get to know him you’ll like him.’
I didn’t know the word ‘platitude’ then, but even an eight-year-old knows she can’t suddenly like someone just because she’s told to. And oh boy, were my eight-year-old instincts right.
Ricky started molesting me when I was 10. When it was time for me to go to bed Mum would say, ‘Goodnight, sweetie. Sleep tight.’ But he‘d get up from his chair, or the couch where he was sitting beside her, and follow me. ‘Gotta say goodnight to my girl, haven’t I? Must tuck her in. Kiss her goodnight,’ he’d say.
He’d come into my bedroom, stand there looking at me, watch me undressing. Even though he didn’t touch me - not at first -I felt uncomfortable, and I soon learnt to take my pyjamas into the bathroom and change there.
Mum wouldn’t believe me when I tried to tell her. Said I was imagining things, making it up. That I watched too much TV; read too many grown-u
p books; that I’d forgotten how my real father used to cuddle me, and that Ricky was my father now.
‘Dad’s cuddles were proper cuddles, not like Ricky does,’ I snapped, but still she wouldn’t listen.
He couldn’t do anything else, not then, not when Mum was in the house. But then Mum got her dream job.
As I’ve said, she was a highly qualified, experienced chef, but when I was little - especially after Dad died and there was just the two of us - she only worked the lunch-time session so she could drop me off at kindergarten or school on her way to work and pick me up on her way home. She always said that one day she’d ‘go back to being a proper chef,’ working in a top restaurant. That, of course, meant dinners, evenings, late nights.
‘I’ll never see you,’ I shouted when she first talked seriously about it to me.
‘Of course you will, sweetie,’ she said. ‘Just different times, different days, that’s all.’
‘But you won’t be here at night,’ I insisted, ‘I’ll be...’
I wanted to say I’d be here alone with Ricky, but how could I say that in front of him, how could I say I hated the way he looked at me?
‘You won’t be on your own, Ange,’ Ricky said. ‘I’ll be here to look after you.’
I just snorted at that, and Mum said ‘Oh Angela, don’t be a spoil sport. You know how much cooking means to me, but I’m only half doing the job I love, that I trained for. I want to do it properly again, in a top restaurant - if I can get it,’ she added.
And get it she did. Three months later, in one of the best restaurants in town, and as head chef. Even I could see how happy she was. How could I spoil it for her? That was when Ricky only looked at me, before he started touching me, before he started making me do things, before he...
When he raped me that’s when I knew I had to kill him. I was only 13 but he raped me. I was only 13 but I knew I had to kill him, knew I had to plan it so no one - least of all my mother -would suspect me.
I knew Mum wouldn’t believe me, wouldn’t tell him to leave, to get out of the house, her house, wouldn’t divorce him. If I went to the police I’d have all the trauma of telling them what happened, having them examine me, and when the doctor proved I had been raped there’d be all those questions again, all the nastiness of charging Ricky - for Mum as well as me.
I couldn’t face that for myself, or for Mum. The only option I had was to kill him. And I had to do it quickly. And soon, before he raped me again. But how?
I thought of keeping a knife under my pillow and stabbing him the next time he tried anything, but I couldn’t be sure of succeeding. What if I couldn’t handle it properly, what if he took it from me? And the thought of getting his blood all over me was terrifying, as was the possibility of being charged with murder, or manslaughter, even if I was only a minor and it was in self-defence. It had to look like an accident, or by someone else, someone unknown. A burglar perhaps.
Plan carefully, Angela, I told myself. Think! How, when, what with, where?
The when was easy - at night, while Mum was at work. Not just because Ricky and I would be alone, but because I needed Mum to have a water-tight alibi. The last thing I wanted was for her to become a suspect. But if she was at work, with seven or eight other people in the kitchen with her all the time and waiters constantly dashing in and out, with all those witnesses the police would know she had nothing to do with it.
That was the when. And would you believe, it was Ricky himself who gave me the where.
We were sitting at the kitchen table, the three of us, over a late Sunday breakfast. Mum had moved our plates to the end of the table - theirs with the traces of fried bread, eggs and bacon; mine with the china egg cup, teaspoon and eggshell on it. It was a family ritual for us, well for me anyway.
Always on Sunday morning Mum gave me a boiled egg with ‘soldiers’. Like when I was little. And like then, I’d tap the top of the egg with the teaspoon till the shell cracked. I loved doing that, did it for as long as I can remember, still somehow get a kick out of it. It was something my Dad had taught me, holding my hand round the spoon when I was little, then laughing and telling me what a clever girl I was when I learned to do it myself. Even now, all this time later, I still see him watching me, laughing with me, when I crack the shell.
That morning when Ricky unwittingly gave me the where, I was reading Macbeth as part of my English homework, Mum and Ricky had the Sunday papers spread out around them.
‘Hey, I hope you’re careful at work, Darl,’ Ricky said. He sat back from the paper he was reading and turned towards Mum. ‘It says here that more accidents happen in the kitchen than anywhere else in the house. If they happen in the kitchen at home they can happen in the kitchen at work, so you be careful my girl. Don’t want you coming home with your fingers chopped off, or with a broken leg from slipping on a dropped soufflé or sliced tomato or something.’
She laughed at that. ‘Oh Ricky, don’t be stupid. I’m a professional, we’re all professionals, we don’t have accidents.’
I briefly took my eyes off the book in front of me and glanced at Ricky’s open paper and the headline which read ‘Kitchens can be dangerous’. I didn’t say anything, but as I turned back to Macbeth I chalked up a mental note for myself. Accidents happen in the kitchen. Kitchens can be dangerous.
For the rest of that day I thought of little else. The kitchen. A kitchen was a good place to kill someone. No bloodstains on the carpet, plenty of instruments at hand to use as the murder weapon, the sink close by to wash my hands in afterwards.
Even if there wasn’t actually blood on my hands, I knew I’d want to wash them once the deed was done. For a few moments Lady Macbeth’s words whispered in my head: ‘A little water clears us of this deed’, but I soon shook them off. A little water would indeed cleanse me of the deed. Forget your second thoughts and the perfumes of Arabia, my Lady — Duncan didn‘t rape you.
Alone in the house next day I stood in the kitchen and looked around. It was all so familiar, I think I knew every inch of it, every item. But today I was looking at everything with a different eye, looking at a setting, imagining a scenario, looking for a murder weapon. Table, work-benches, oven, sink, cupboards, fridge, freezer, pantry. Appliances of all sorts. Some utensils hanging on a rack suspended from the ceiling. Pots. Pans. Skillets. Deep fryer. Chopping boards. Blenders. Whisks. Ladles. Wooden spoons, slotted spoons. Skewers. Graters. Cutlery.
Knives. Mum’s range of chef’s knives on a magnetic strip above the work bench, close to hand, easy for her to take down. Easy for me - or a hypothetical burglar - to take down. A knife was the obvious thing, wasn’t it? I considered them all. Paring knife — sharp, but a bit small. Boning knife - even sharper, and for one glorious moment I imagined holding it in my hand, standing close to him and sliding it deftly between his ribs the way Mum did with a side of lamb.
Then my eyes fell on her gleaming carving knife. I had a sudden picture of Mum carving our Sunday joint - the carving knife in one hand, the carving fork in the other.
Why not the fork, with its two long, sharp prongs - they’d go straight into his throat, or gouge out his eyes. In my imagination I saw him sitting at the table, saw me stab him in the throat. The blood spurted, he gurgled, his eyes bulged and he slumped forward knocking over the bowl of cereal where it shattered as it hit the tiled floor.
No, that wouldn’t do. I have to kill him at night, he wouldn’t be sitting there eating cereal. Drinking coffee perhaps? Again no, he wouldn’t just be sitting there if a burglar broke in, would he? It had to appear that he’d disturbed a burglar, heard him break in, or heard a noise from another room and had come to investigate. Or he’d come out to the kitchen to make coffee and had noticed the open door. Something shattered on the floor was a good idea though. A coffee mug, or one of the canisters knocked off the bench would look as though he and the burglar had struggled before the intruder had reached out and grabbed the carving fork and thrust it into Ricky’s throat.
But a knife or the fork wouldn’t do. I’d have to get close to him, and he’s bigger, stronger than me. At best he could wrest it from me, at worst use it on me.
I stood there, gazing round the room. I looked at, and considered, everything.
Maybe the cleaver would be best. Yeah, if I crept up behind him. But the blood would spurt, I’d get it all over me. I nearly vomited on the spot just thinking about it.
Stick his head in the oven, roast him like the pig he is? Yeah, right, he’d stay still while I did that, wouldn’t he.
Fill the sink bowl with water, hold his head down till he drowned? Huh, that’s as good as the oven! Have some sense, Angela.
A saucepan? One of the heavy iron ones? Bash him over the head with that? Did I want to get that close to him? What about the cast-iron skillet? It was a good heavy implement, and its handle was longer than any of the pots or pans. That made me think about things with longer handles. One of his golf clubs would be good, but why would it be in the kitchen? He never took them in there. Mum would tell the police that, they’d become suspicious, wouldn’t believe the burglary-gone-wrong theory.
