Warm Honey

by Dave Cornford

  “I’ll come and see you again son.”

  “Just ring first, check that I’m in. I’m getting out next week for Chrissie if I’m up to it. Phone Rob and check that it’s okay.” I felt like the bloke who introduces his date to a mate and they hook up.

  “I think that went well,” said Charis on the way down like a football coach summarising the match: “We started off tentatively, but after the first fifteen minutes we got a few shots on target and suddenly we were away. I was pretty confident after half-time, and the boys were magnificent in defence.”

  “You looked a little nervous at first though.” There was an orderly in the lift, but Charis was speaking past her – a mistress discussing personal matters in front of a trusted servant.

  Dad mumbled, reddening up. He was not used to Charis’s straight-shooter approach, and certainly not in the full public glare that was four people in a hospital lift.

  “He looked good in that photo,” said Dad when we’d stepped out, “He’s grown up handsome.”

  “I guess you never got to see him at his best.” It sounded like I had written off Bevan already.

  “You’ll have plenty of time to see him at his best,” There was Charis, bestowing healed bodies and relationships in a single statement.

  “I’d better be off I suppose,” said Dad, doing his handshake-hug thing with Charis again. “Got to meet up with Gracie and the kids at the London Court clock at three. Christmas shopping. Lauren wants to see the knights on horseback going round when it chimes.”

  “That brings me back!”

  “Aye, that was our meeting point back then too. You and Stuart used to race on ahead to watch the clock reach the hour, remember?”

  “Have a good Christmas Dad if I don’t get to see you before.”

  “Aye son, you too. You all at your mother’s for it?”

  “Christmas Day. Boxing Day at Charis’s. You?”

  “Just a quiet one at home - the four of us. Gracie’s sister’s on Boxing Day--a mad house!”

  “Wonder if he’ll tell them where he’s been?” mused Charis as Dad crossed the road and walked down to his car.

  “Don’t you think he’ll tell them?”

  “He’s been Christmas shopping remember. He’ll tell them he couldn’t find what he was looking for.”

  “Seems like this time he might have found it!”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Benny and Jude celebrated the season of peace on earth and goodwill to all men by breaking up. They spent the lead-up days exchanging insults gift-wrapped in sarcasm. It was tense. I’d come home at night and the silver Christmas tree would be blinking nervously in the window, sending out SOS signals to the tree across the road. Three days a week in the office with Benny was more than enough without the thought of sullen breakfasts, grunts as we passed each other on the bathroom hand-over, and the angry drive to and from work with Benny. Then there was the guilty complicity of the “He’s a bastard--She’s a bitch” tennis match in which you have to applaud every forced error and backhand winner--whoever makes it. Besides I had my own stuff to deal with. I decided to make myself scarce.

  “I’m going to stay at Charis’s for a week or so, just till after Christmas.”

  “Et tu Brute,” said Benny, hunched over the steering wheel in peak hour, coffee in hand. “Watch the road idiot!”

  “It’s not that. You guys need space to sort things out.”

  “No, I just need opportunity. I’ve already got motive and a weapon.”

  He formalised the break-up by getting with one of the admin girls at the staff Christmas party, another blonde thin thing called Samantha who’d been flagging her interest in him weeks before the tinsel had gone up. I walked in on him in the fire-escape playing with his new Christmas present.

  “Whoops, sorry.”

  “Good old mistletoe,” said Benny holding up a sprig of holly.

  “Just going to the bin with empties.”

  Blonde-Thin-Thing adjusted her top and muttered something she’d prepared earlier about “these office Christmas parties.” I noticed her engagement ring.

  “My lips are sealed,” I said.

  “Yours too eh?” laughed Benny, ”Who’s the lucky member of staff?”

  “Ha ha.” I walked down the first flight, the clink of the empties echoing in the unsealed concrete chamber.

  “Hoy!” Benny looked over the edge at me and winked. “You’re staying at Charis’s tonight, right?”

  * * *

  “Mum’s added Bevan to her prayer-list,” said Charis

  We were lying in the hammock on the back verandah at her place on Christmas night. It was sweltering. Even the Norfolk pine seemed stunned by the lack of sea-breeze, standing silent and resentful in the heat. We’d done lunch at Mum’s and had gotten through the day more or less unscathed, except for Susannah. She’d shocked us all by downing nine or ten glasses of chateau-de-cardboard, before slumping over as mum brought in the pudding.

  “Don’t light it, she’ll catch fire,” Chris had laughed. Stuart looked embarrassed, as he’d helped her to her feet.

  “The heat,” he’d said looking at Mum’s bemused face, “She’s not used to it at Christmas-time.” He’d started to walk her towards her room.

  “Don’t forget her pillow,” Chris had offered helpfully, blowing up the silver wine-cask bladder and waving it over his head.

  The hammock creaked as we tried to find a place where our sweaty legs didn’t stick to each other.

  “She has a prayer-list? Like a shopping list? Am I on it?”

  “Getting closer to Number One all the time,” she laughed.

  “What do I have to do to get the top?”

  “Be me.”

  “You’re top of your Mum’s prayer list? You must be very very special, or very very bad!”

  “Or very very both?”

  “I can’t image you being bad.”

  “Depends on your definition of bad doesn’t it? I know at least one family that thinks I’m the worst person alive.” No laugh.

  There was that thump in my chest again, like when I’d seen Dad standing outside the hospital waiting to visit Bevan. “Not my family, they love you.” Despite the heat she hugged me to her and I lay there with her arms too tight around my neck. What had she done? Broken a son’s heart? Betrayed a family secret? Murdered someone and gotten away with it?

  The flyscreen door opened and her Dad walked out. He stood on the back step, hands in shorts pockets, staring up at the stars. He broke the moment and the silence with a post-Christmas dinner fart.

  “S’cuse me,” he muttered to nobody, shaking it out past his skinny leg. He turned and saw us in the hammock. “Better out than in,” he grunted, giving a last shake and walking back in. The flyscreen banged shut and we could hear him clanking round in the kitchen.

  “That’s my dad for you – farts more than he talks.”

  “You heard him, better out than in. My Dad didn’t talk or fart!”

  “Maybe that’s why he’s so uptight!”

  “Yeh, no pressure valve. Your Dad’s pretty relaxed compared to mine.”

  “Yeh, but Mum says she’s been married to him all these years and still doesn’t know what’s going on inside his head. I’m the opposite.”

  “You talk more than you fart?”

  “In public anyway!” The Norfolk swished in a stray breeze that was gone as soon as it arrived. “I hope Bevan’s going to be okay.” Her voice seemed small.

  “He’ll have your mum to answer to if he’s not. All that praying gone to waste!”

  “Maybe. Or maybe God’s got selective hearing. Like when you were a kid and your mum says ‘Do the dishes’ and you don’t hear her, but then she says ‘Who wants chocolate?’ and you hear that. Maybe prayer’s like that.”

  “If that’s the case then most of my prayers have been dishes ones, not chocolate.”

  “You pray do you?” Charis rolled round to get a better look at me, making the rafters
groan as the hammock ropes bit into them.

  “Used to, when I was young. Mostly that Mum and Dad wouldn’t get divorced, and that we would get a colour TV. Kid stuff really.”

  “So now you think prayer’s a dud?”

  “Why’d you say that?”

  “Your parents.”

  “Yeh, but we got a colour TV long before that ever happened, so he must have heard something!”

  “Let’s just hope God hears ‘chocolate’ when we’re praying for Bevan then,” she murmured. Our conversation slowed and slurred, like batteries running out in one of those old Walkmans.

  I lay there wondering about what Charis had said about being at the top of her Mum’s prayer list. “I know at least one family that thinks I’m the worst person alive,” she’d said. I looked at her face, quiet and still. Innocent.

  My mind couldn’t sustain the thought, and tripped on to thinking about why the first book Charis gave me had to be about death. She said it would change my life. Maybe she should have given me The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and we’d be having this conversation at a swanky bar after a high-powered business meeting. Yet Ivan Illyich was a highly effective person and right at the end God, or someone, let him in on an eighth secret: death is more effective than you’ll ever be. Tolstoy got dying right. Even Dickens wrote smaltzy death-bed scenes. But Tolstoy wrote about death as if it was studying him as much as he was studying it: Death standing there observing; jotting stuff down in his spiral notebook.

  I’d only been to one funeral. Mum’s mum died of a stroke just before we came to Australia. I was eight and allowed to go. The other three boys were too young and had been left with Dad’s brother’s family for the day. The coffin was sitting open in the front room at my great-grandmother’s house in Belfast when we got there. Mum’s family were all Brethren, farmers from the country. The whole service was going to be in the house with none of the fancy stuff the Catholics did at funerals, or even some of those less committed Protestants. A meeting-hall elder did some long readings and even longer prayers. He finished with a sermon warning us not to die in a Christless state. We sang Mum’s mum’s favourite hymn, When We All Get to Heaven, without the music which is what the Brethren did because there wasn’t supposed to be music in church. They lowed like cows waiting to be milked: When we all get to heaven, what a day of rejoicing that will be. When we all see Jesus we’ll sing and shout the victory. Unless of course heaven had musical instruments, then we’ll all stand there with our arms folded tsk-tsking.

  Later Mum’s aunties had bustled around in black, handing out tea in good china; passing round sandwiches and hot-pink Battenberg treats. Their husbands, who’d seen and administered plenty of death on their farms, sat around the coffin talking pig prices and crops. Once when everyone had left the room I went up and had a look inside. Mum’s mum looked pale. Pale and blank. People always say “Oh he looks so peaceful lying there!”, but I reckon it’s blank. Even the rouge and lipstick can’t hide the blankness the way it does on a living face. She was still wearing the wig she’d worn in public, and now it was joined in death by the rest of her. I nearly died myself when I went to touch her and Dad said “Don’t” as he walked into the room behind me. We didn’t go to the graveside because the council workers were on strike and wouldn’t dig the hole. One of the uncles had offered to operate the backhoe himself, but the funeral director said the union wouldn’t like it. Mum’s mum left in the back of the car, us standing watching her go.

  “It’s just like when we waved her off at her wedding,” one auntie had said, setting them all off again. It was the first time I’d ever heard anyone mention that Mum’s mum had had a husband.

  Charis and I fell asleep in the hammock. I woke a few hours later to a dark house and a desert easterly blowing cold across a moonless sky. I shivered. Charis’s arms were goose-bumpy. I lay there for a while listening to the soft burr of her snore. The sound aroused a protective tenderness in me and I crept inside to find her a blanket, tip-toeing past the motor-bike revs of her parents asleep in their bedroom. I covered her over and stood watch for a while, realising as I did that I wanted to marry her. The feeling came out of nowhere, but was so recognisable, so primal and hardwired, that I knew it instantly. They say the same thing about when you have a baby. A latent emotion kicks in that you never knew you had; a prehistoric behemoth rising from some subterranean cavern, enabling you to die for – and kill for – this mewing gooey lump lying on your wife’s stomach. Who were these people who thought her the worst person alive? The cold got to me again. It was impossible to get back into the hammock without waking her up, so I crept back to her room. Her pillow smelt of her and I fell asleep feeling closer to her than if she’d been lying there next to me.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Stu had hugged Bevan really tight and long when he and Susannah left. At Mum’s insistence this time we actually did do the rent-a-crowd thing at the airport, waving them goodbye with more emotion than usual. Even Susannah seemed stirred by it. Mum had come with me and Charis, so she wasn’t going to get to wait for the plane to leave like she did usually.

  “They won’t be able to see you anyway, Mum,” I said when she asked, like I always did.

  “I just like to know they’re off safely.”

  “You’ll hear about it on the news if they’re not.”

  “Robert!” she scolded. “Is he like this with you Charis?” she queried, in a tone that suggested that I would be like that with Charis.

  “Let’s stay for a while, Rob,” said Charis, “You pair go up to the viewing deck and I’ll get us some drinks and bring them up.”

  “There you go, Charis wants to stay too.” We sat in silence watching the plane load up on the hot flat tarmac. In the distance the hills were scabby and sunburnt. A few plumes of smoke rose from behind them, as farmers and volunteer fire services fought blazes in small fly-ridden towns you never visit.

  “Your drinks.“ Charis handed us an orange juice each. Mum made a show of getting her purse. “It’s on me,” said Charis.

  “I’ll pay for the parking then,” said Mum, covering her debts.

  * * *

  The drive from Perth International Airport is depressing enough without the added pain of a goodbye, and I could see Mum in the rear-vision mirror staring out the window. Air-transport warehouses, car rental companies, and fuel depots clustered the airport: hawkers selling religious artefacts near the Vatican. Summer had leached the colour from the median strip. Rusty bore water from sprinklers had stained the tilt-panel factories turning everything sepia in the glare. I got every set of lights and sat muttering behind trucks carrying steel or mining equipment.

  “I just hope Stuart doesn’t have to come back sometime this year,” said Mum suddenly. She hadn’t said much for the first fifteen minutes or so in the car. Silence wasn’t a natural enough state for Mum for her to just lapse into it: Mum silence required time and effort.

  “Great! Another red! What is it with these lights?”

  “Don’t be impatient dear.”

  “Mum, I’m driving.”

  “You’re not going to get there any faster worrying about it.”

  “Mum!”

  “So what did you think of Susannah?” asked Charis, turning around to her from the front.

  “She seems nice enough.”

  “You said that when she arrived Mum!”

  “Well I don’t really know her do I? She doesn’t say much. It was like pulling teeth having a conversation with her.” I imagined Mum hovering over Susannah with a pair of pliers. More silence. “Your father left us thirteen years ago this Friday.”

  “Thirteen? Isn’t it twelve?”

  “Thirteen. I should know.”

  “Unhappy anniversaries,” sympathised Charis, “I keep them too. I’m okay as long as happy ones outweigh the unhappy.”

  “I guess it’s a happy one for him, it’s the day he finally got what he wanted.”

  “You don’t kno
w that Mum.” We’d had this conversation too many times.

  “Well he’s got his fancy woman hasn’t he?”

  “I’m sure she’s not so fancy after thirteen years.”

  “Gracie’s not a patch on you anyway Mrs McEvoy,” said Charis, before catching herself. Despite trying not to I caught Mum’s eyes in the mirror. Pause. Gather. Launch!

  “So you’ve met her then have you Charis?” Mum leaned forward, holding onto the passenger seat head-rest. My neck went prickly and hot.

  “Oh just the once,” said Charis, trying to make it sound casual.

  “Where was that?”

  I plunged in headfirst. I could worry about the rocks later. “Look Mum, I phoned Dad a few months back and he invited us over for dinner. We went once, and it was okay, but we haven’t been back.”

  “And how was he?”

  “Fine mum.”

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “Did he seem happy to you?”

  Dad never seemed happy. He hadn’t seemed happy with Mum and he hadn’t seemed particularly happy with Gracie either, so it was probably nothing to do with either of them. “He looked like Dad, only older.”

  “So he’s aged then?” Mum sounded pleased, as if by leaving Dad had given her one last snub by defying time and reversing the aging process. In fact he’d tried that already in the months before he left. He’d starting exercising and watching his diet. He’d even bought some new clothes. “You’d don’t have to kill yourself for me you know,” Mum’d called through the kitchen window as he’d sweated with the dumbbells on the verandah, never realising he had no intention of killing himself for her.