Warm Honey

by Dave Cornford

  “It’s been twelve years Mum, of course he’s aged.”

  “Thirteen!”

  We were a few streets away from Mum’s and I shot across a roundabout, not giving way to a red ute. Charis yelped.

  “Robert!” scolded Mum.

  I was almost sorry we missed. A minor accident at this moment would have been a pleasant distraction; a chance to bump into someone and exchange details.

  “You folks not coming in for a cuppa?” asked Mum neutrally, as I idled the engine in her driveway.

  “No thanks Mum, we’re going out with Bevan and Vicki before he goes back in.”

  “Have you told your father about Bevan?” she asked getting out.

  “No Mum, not yet.”

  “Maybe you should,” she said, bending down to speak through the open window on Charis’s side, “That might get him thinking.”

  “I’ll think about it Mum.” I put the car into gear and Mum stood up and took her hand off the roof.

  “Bye Mum.”

  “Bye dear, bye Charis.”

  “See you Mrs McEvoy.” Mum looked lonely standing in the driveway and I nearly changed my mind about the cuppa. I beeped goodbye and Charis slumped in her seat as we drove down the street.

  “I am so so sorry, it just slipped out.”

  “She was going to find out sooner or later.”

  “At least you know she wants him to see Bevan,” she said, “Even if you did have lie about it.”

  “I didn’t have to, I just wanted to buy some time.” I missed the clutch and the gears gnashed. The lie annoyed me. It had lurked like a young snake in Eden waiting for opportunity. I‘d felt awkward like you do when you haven’t lied for a while. A lie is a foreign transplant that requires the anti-rejection drug of habit to make it feel natural. Dad had lied to buy himself some time when he left Mum for Gracie, and for all I knew he was lying to Gracie about visiting Bevan. He had sneaked out of our lives on the strength of his lies. He was sneaking back into our lives just like he’d sneaked out and my lie of omission had made me an accessory-after-the-fact. “Maybe I should just tell Dad to back off a bit. Wait till things settle down. I feel like it’s always up to me to sort out the family stuff-ups.” I crunched the gears again pulling away at lights that had deliberately stayed red too long.

  “You don’t have to sort everything out,” said Charis, “You’re not the Messiah.” I turned onto the freeway that was stop-starting with afternoon peak hour, “But don’t worry,” she added, running her hand through my hair, “You’re not a very naughty boy either!”

  “Tell that to Mum,” I said, “She’s the one you need to convince.”

  * * *

  I found out that I’d lost my job at the agency the following Monday. I remember it because it was the same day that Bevan went in for his third round of chemo.

  “She’s baaack!” announced Benny as he walked in the front door. For a minute I thought he’d meant Jude was back. She’d moved out two weeks ago, via the spare bedroom she’d started in. She’d been replaced by a pile of empties and two loud one-night stands, both of whom had mumbled “sorry” coming out of the bathroom past me in the morning. They’d both looked it too.

  “Who’s back?” It was my day off and I was making dinner with some vegetable matter in it. Without Jude to temper him Benny was back to his carnivorous best.

  “Natalie,” he said, looking over my shoulder and picking at the half-made salad. “Chilli olives, my favourite!”

  “I thought you said she wasn’t coming back!” I tried to sound casual. It came out like a kid whining “that’s not fair!” in the playground.

  “She wasn’t, but it turns out motherhood’s not her thing.”

  “What she doing with the baby?”

  “Exposing it on the hillside or something, I dunno. Day-care I suppose.” He popped a cherry tomato in his mouth, spraying juice as he bit into it.

  “When?”

  “I think she starts next week. Rick says go and see him tomorrow when you get in and he’ll finalise things for you; pay and all that.”

  “When’s my last day?”

  “Dunno. You’re not making that for me?” he asked, grabbing a handful of beansprouts out of the bowl, “Cos I’m out for dinner - with Samantha.” He said it in a proud whisper, like a conspirator unable to help himself.

  “Fire-escape Sam?”

  “No, Fireman Sam,” he said crunching a carrot stick, “Of course fire-escape Sam. She’s one hot chick.”

  “Maybe that’s why you needed to do it in the fire-escape.”

  “Ha ha.”

  “What about her fiance?”

  “They split up on New Year’s Eve. Same night as me and Jude. Coincidence eh?”

  “I don’t believe in co-incidences.”

  “You’re not getting all spooky spiritual on me?” he laughed. “You’ve been hanging around Charis too long.”

  “Not spiritual, just cynical.” It was the wrong thing to say. I saw his complexion darken.

  “Don’t judge me, smart-ass.” The tone of his voice was the teacher correcting her least-favourite student.

  “Sorry,” I said, slicing cucumber and carrots. The knife cracked sharply on the granite cutting-board.

  “Maybe if your life was a bit more together you could be a bit more like me. Someone could finance your lifestyle instead of you financing theirs.” He waved his arms around at the room to show me where my rent was going: stainless steel gadgets, charcoal sketches of curvy women in matt-black frames, a full wine rack. He did it with such evangelistic zeal that I felt sorry for him. Benny grabbed a piece of feta, walked off, and shuffled distractedly through the mail.

  “Don’t wait up!” he called, slamming his bedroom door. I waited until I could hear the shower, then tipped the salad into the bin like it was a flyblown carcass, picked up my keys, and drove to Charis’ for dinner.

  “I’m sorry about your job,” said Charis, hugging me. “Here I’ll make you some dinner.” She scoured the cupboards. “Beans on toast?

  Their kitchen was a geologist’s dream: the opposite of Benny’s seared and deliberate landscape. Sedimentary layers of paperwork and magazines covering every counter. Tupperware that was popular twenty years ago balanced on jars that might eventually pickle something if they ever broke the surface again. Rubber-bands, paperclips, and thumb-tacks gathered like scree next to the phone. It was a room of seismic stability.

  “Beans on toast? I was hoping for roast swan.”

  “There’s not much in the house. Mum’s doing the shopping tomorrow. We’ll have a cupboard full of beans and a freezer full of bread by then.”

  “Right, we’re off,” said her mum walking in with her going-out look on, the same clothes, but with hair pinned back and a slash of red lipstick. Her dad followed close behind, smelling of Brut 33, his comb-over glowing with anticipation. “Hi Rob love,” said her Mum, “Didn’t hear you come in. How’s Bevan?”

  “Went in again today. Third round.”

  “We’re beseeching the Lord, aren’t we Charlie?” Charis’ dad grunted. I tried to imagine him beseeching anyone, let alone God. “Feed the cats Charis, love. Your dad’s taking me to Sizzlers and a film.”

  “Charles, you old Casanova you!” said Charis feigning shock, “Dinner? A movie? Play your cards right and you might get lucky later!”

  “Charis!” said her mum. Another grunt from her Dad, but a slight smile this time. Perhaps there was one person he could still beseech.

  “Don’t eat the prawns!” called Charis as the front door closed. “They sit there for hours,” she explained to me gleaning the cupboards again. She held up two cans and waved them. “Will sir be having the beans in tomato sauce tonight, or ham sauce?”

  * * *

  The stress in the family was starting to build. Even Chris was feeling it. With my job at the agency finished I was taking up Bevan’s slack for him. We were working full-time on a house in North Perth, a tuck-pointed Federation with
a white-anted ceiling and a finance-broking owner who saw no profit in humour. In the circumstances I liked the predictability and the cash. Work by seven in the morning; race home and shower at four – the cast of dust sloughing off me; eat something quickly; and then head off to the hospital, occasionally swinging by the book exchange to pick up Charis.

  “They buy ‘em, they tart ‘em up, and never fix the crap underneath,” said Chris, nail-gunning a treated-pine wall frame. The compressor kicked in, making me jump as it always did. “Here, hold that straight. Tight. It’s not Charis’ tit.” The gun bounced as he nailed. “Bet you a tenner Vicki shoots through one of these days,” he shouted, the compressor’s vibrato stopping half-way through his sentence.

  “Why’d you say that?”

  “She’s not the type to hang around when stuff like this happens.”

  “You’re being a bit hard on her don’t you think. She’s hung around till now.”

  Chris stopped nailing and stood up, wiping his arm across his face. “You know your problem? You’re too soft. If it’d been me I’d tell her to leave when it all happened, rather than her wait until I’m crapping blood to say ‘Sorry it’s all too much.’” He picked a splinter out of his hand with a misfired nail. “Bet you a tenner,” he said turning to the framework again. The compressor kicked in, drowning out my “You’re on.”

  I looked hard for signs of flightiness in Vicki, but all I saw was a desperate look that couldn’t be swiped with a credit card. She was in the hospital every day now, taking days off work to compete with Mum in a selfless devotion show-down. They had both started using the visitor’s room just outside the leukaemia ward. The door had a sign on it: “Family Room”, presumably because “Waiting Room” would have sounded too insensitive. It had once been a ward, but now it was done up with an eighties-style grey and pink couch set, a coffee table, and an urn in the corner with polystyrene cups, Maxwell House sachets and hardened sugar in a bowl. The walls still had the marks where the nurse-alert button had been. The hospital TV clung to its bracket in the ceiling, looking for a bed to focus on.

  Mum would come in armed with a day’s supply of food and a couple of novels from the library. She’d take over a corner and spread her stuff around. She was already wearing a Homer Simpson-style groove in the couch. Vicki would eat Mum’s food, but couldn’t face the coffee, buying lattes at a place round the corner.

  “What is it with you young people and your coffee?” Mum observed one day when Vicki came back with one for me too.

  “That Maxwell House stuff isn’t real coffee,” said Vicki, sipping at her corrugated cup.

  “Beggars can’t be choosers,” mantra’d Mum.

  “I’m not a beggar. I’ll spend my three-fifty anytime rather than drink that.” Vicki rolled her eyes, then pushed the door open with the space where normal-sized girls have a bum. “I’m off to see him,” she said, walking out with the offending beverage.

  “Don’t forget to wash your hands!” said Mum, like she did when we were kids and had been to the toilet. Vicki said something back to us but we couldn’t make it out.

  “Why do you keep winding her up, Mum?”

  “I’m just reminding her. She’s got a coffee in her hand, she might forget.”

  “I mean about buying good coffee.”

  “I’m entitled to my opinion. She’s just being too sensitive.”

  Vicki’s parents had invited Mum around for a meal once, checking up on Bevan’s breeding. It had been a clash of civilisations. “They don’t have anything to talk about,” Mum had said later, “It’s all holidays and fancy do’s, and the next renovation.”

  “Those are the things people talk about when they don’t have anything to talk about,” I’d said, imagining Mum sitting round some fancy table eating something Nigella Lawson had invented. Here was a woman who’d spent her early years in in Dublin -- a foster child in a family of eight. A little girl picking sweets up off the streets. The orange, apple, and clay pipe in her Christmas stocking. Stealing the ice off the fish in the markets in summer and sitting under the stalls sucking the scaly coldness. The Liffy River that flowed black as Guinness just metres from her house that had drowned young Ivor next door. It pulled him down into its quiet molasses, giving him back when it had finished with him down near the Halfpenny Bridge. A crowd had gathered around his house when they dragged him out: neighbours and wide-eyed children standing in the hall. The screech of Ivor’s mother calling his name. How can a bathroom renovation horror story compete with all that?

  “Dad phoned me,” said Bevan when I caught him in a rare moment alone one day. He was a bit brighter -- a good day. Vicki had tidied up the room, packing up the cards and magazines, and throwing out the withering balloons. The novelty had worn off and the room had a no-nonsense look to it now, as if we were saying “Okay science, it’s over to you.” Tubes dangled out of Bevan’s arms, attached to machines that looked like mini ATMs. Every so often a nurse would walk in and punch in a PIN. The air-conditioning hummed along, ignoring the late summer sun beating at the window.

  “He hasn’t phoned me recently,” I said, “He’s not been in to see you?”

  “He says he’s going to try to.”

  “Wonder if he’s told Gracie about coming in yet?”

  “What’s she like?” he asked suddenly.

  “She’s okay, why?”

  “Mum said that you and Charis have met her and that Charis said she wasn’t a patch on Mum.”

  “Yeah, Mum took that as a compliment!” We both laughed. Bevan groaned and held his side. Humour and pain intertwined. “Dad’s probably worried he’ll bump into Mum, that’s why he’s not coming in,” I said.

  “Vick and I will have him over when I’ve kicked this thing. Might even have Gracie and the kids round too.”

  “Mum won’t like that.”

  “She doesn’t need to know.”

  Why were we all pandering to Dad? We were tip-toeing around him, fluffing his emotional pillows and smoothing out the bed he’d chosen to lie in, as if he were the patient. Let him come in. Let him bump into Mum. She was dry as tinder, ready for it now. Better to have a controlled burn in the hospital than a raging inferno of emotions if Bevan died and we all ended up at a funeral together.

  The heat prickled my bare arms as I walked back to the car, and I stood on the footpath with the doors open, waiting for the interior to cool down. The dark stone of St Mary’s Cathedral sulked in the hospital’s shadow, overthrown as the last place of refuge. In a final insult it had been forced to sit in the shadow of its conqueror, waiting for tit-bits to fall from the table. I shut the car and walked into the cathedral grounds, up the steps, and through the oak doors. Inside was cool -- cooler than the hospital. A natural cool, as if the stone had been hewn in winter, and was still giving off the chill locked deep within it. My eyes adjusted to the darkness. Jesus hung to one side, competing for centre stage with his mother. He had a “And you think you’ve got problems!” in his eyes that didn’t inspire confidence. A tray of votive candles flickered, making shadows of the hunched figures that stood over them. One was shaking and I could hear a sniffy sob. The altar stood behind its rail: an isolation ward keeping the germs of sin at bay. I almost went up to the front to light a candle, but the Protestant in me baulked.

  Someone else came through the doors, bumping into me as I turned to leave. Outside again the sun was blinding. The cathedral lawn was Eden green, except for one patch -- a skin cancer of crackly dead brown -- where a sprinkler hadn’t reached. You can’t turn your back on nature for a second.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The chain of events that derailed things started when we found out that the chemo wasn’t working. Bevan was going to need a bone marrow transplant to survive. The doctors had called Mum and Vicki and told them that they’d be holding a family conference at five-thirty that evening, and that the whole family should come. Charis had been planning on going in with me to see Bevan that day anyway so she came too.


  “It’s immediate family only,” snapped Vicki when she saw Charis walking in behind me. “Just for once Robert!” The strain on Vicki was an emotional sickness shutting down all but her most vital organs. The immunities that had suppressed the worst of her sharpness were needed elsewhere. Optional extras, like being nice in public, were abandoned to their fate. Vicki’s naked core was coming to the surface. It was hard to blame her under the circumstances.

  “I’ll go down to the cafe for a while,” Charis offered.

  “Could you?” It came out as sharply as it was intended.

  “I’ll come and get you when we’ve finished,” I said.

  “Your heart’s pounding,” said Charis, hugging me. “Love you,” she whispered. She walked over to Bevan’s bed. Mum was sitting next to him, holding his hand and looking tired. Charis bent over and put one arm around Mum and the other lightly across Bevan’s falling and rising chest. He put a hand on hers and they stayed that way for a few seconds. “Love you too.”

  “Thanks love,” sniffled Mum, a tear snagging on her cheekbone before pulling away. Charis hugged Vicki on her way out, but she stiffened like she didn’t want to catch anything.

  “Where’s Charis going?” asked Chris walking in a few second later, smelling of sweat, hospital hand lotion, and a can or two.

  “Look, just for once this isn’t about Charis, it’s about Bevan!” Vicki was shouting this time. “If this family could sort itself out it could focus on the real problem in this room.”

  “Oh I think we’ve sorted out the real problem in this room,” said Chris.

  “Chris, don’t. Please,” said Mum quietly.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” said Vicki.

  “Forget about it,” Chris waved his hand at her like he was swatting a fly, “Just forget it. As you say, it’s about Bevan.”

  “Would you lot shut up!” Bevan’s voice flew across the room like shards of glass. “I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it.” He was whispering it under his breath. He was trying to clench his fists, but ended up clenching his teeth instead. He’d lost a lot of feeling in his finger-tips and toes a week or so ago. Funny how the feeling went, but the pain stayed.