The Briny Café

by Susan Duncan

  Kate smiles shyly. “As close as it gets to the real one. As far as I know, anyway.”

  The kitchen is unheated and the night is cold. So they sit on plain white cushions on polished floorboards, in an essentially bare sitting room. One on each side of the large stone fireplace where a good blaze takes the chill off the room.

  They tuck into a rogan josh that’s more fiery than Ettie intended. “Chilli is hard to judge,” she apologises. “The heat can sometimes depend on the time of year it is picked.” Within reaching distance, side dishes in rainbow colours cover a glass-topped coffee table. Mango chutney. Tomato and red onion splashed with paprika and white vinegar. Banana and coconut drizzled with lemon juice. Yoghurt and cucumber spiked with mint. Eggplant and chilli fragrant with garlic. Peanuts stand alone. Pineapple teams with crystallised ginger.

  “Traditional and untraditional accompaniments,” Ettie explains, pointing out which is which. “Restraint has never been my strongest suit.”

  Over one of the smallest sound systems Ettie’s ever seen, Chris Isaak sings smoothly about tomorrow never coming. Oldies’ music, not the kind she expected to hear from a gung-ho reporter who must be at least twenty-five years her junior.

  “Everyone wants to know how you managed to keep the chippies on site,” Ettie says, spooning more rice into her bowl.

  Kate looks up from her curry, surprised. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, love, one day on, two days off, that’s how most jobs are done around here.”

  “Really?”

  “Word is you don’t even feed and water them. There must be some secret.”

  Kate puts her bowl on a scrubbed stone hearth. She reaches into a basket filled with discarded builder’s timber and throws a piece on the fire. Hot spots reflect off the bare boards, shadows dance on the freshly whitewashed walls. “If there is, it escapes me. All I do is clean up after they leave and get things set up so there’s no mucking about the next day.”

  Ettie ladles curry sauce over her rice. “That must be it, then. They don’t have to think hard first thing in the morning. Takes the sting out of their hangovers.”

  “Oh and I paid them at the end of every day’s work. Cash in hand.”

  “Ah.” Ettie nods. No waiting until the end of the job for their money. A brilliant strategy? Or dumb luck? She eventually decides Kate has the instincts of a born entrepreneur.

  The music comes to a stop. Outside, a bullet of cold air whips down the gully. It tweaks the surface of the bay but can’t find its way past the newly applied mortar and the tightly puttied windows. The room stays cosy and warm. Ettie goes over and crouches in front of a basket filled with CDs. She finds Frank Sinatra, another surprise. What strange forces, beyond a shocker mother, have shaped this young woman?

  “You ever feel afraid here?” she asks, handing Kate the CD.

  “Should I?” Kate gets up to replace Isaak with Sinatra. She presses the play button and Frank’s voice spills over them warmly.

  “No, of course not. The previous owner, the one before you, it was ‘Old Timer’s’ that got him. His daughter went on with all that ghost mumbo jumbo to hide the fact that he was losing his mind.”

  “The ghost didn’t send him mad then?” Kate says with a wry smile.

  Ettie shakes her head, wishing she hadn’t mentioned it. She collects their empty plates but Kate immediately takes them out of her hands and carries them into the kitchen. Ettie hears a tap run. She follows, unable to sit idly when someone is working. She grabs a spotless ironed tea towel when she notices there’s no dishwasher.

  “By the way, my holidays are over and I’ll be gone for a few days from Monday,” Kate says. “An assignment in New York. I was hoping – if you’re passing – that you could keep an eye on the house.”

  “New York!” Ettie almost drops the bowl she’s drying.

  “Trust me, it’s not as exciting as it sounds.”

  “You mean nowhere near as exciting as a tinny ride to the Spit to clean a house trashed by three teenage boys who think shoving all their rotten food under the bed constitutes a tidy up? That’s my day on Monday while you’re sitting in business class sipping champagne.” She hears the bitterness, tinged with despair, and goes quiet.

  “You want to know how it really works?” Kate blurts, rushing on without waiting for an answer. “Right. For a start, scrap business class. It’s cattle car all the way. It will take thirty-six hours to make it from my front door to my appointment. I will get forty-five minutes to do an in-depth interview that should take a week. I will return to my hotel room and spend the next twenty-four hours hunched over a computer positioning key points in a stranger’s life until they make some sense. I will then order food from room service, grab whatever sleep I can and make my way back to the airport the next day. No time for museums, art galleries, a Broadway show, or even a quick look in the windows at Tiffany’s. By the time I pitch up back at the office, the story will be laid out, subbed and hitting the presses. Already yesterday’s news.” Kate blushes and swallows whatever she is about to say with an apologetic smile. “Bit of a rant there. Sorry.”

  Ettie finishes drying the second bowl and stacks it neatly inside the other one. “If you want the truth, Kate, it sounds pretty amazing from my side of the fence. All jobs are hard yakka. That’s why you get paid to do them.”

  “I’m not afraid of work. But I’m talking to a twenty-two-year-old brat who’s just inherited a business empire without lifting a finger to earn it. He’s famous for wild partying, fast cars and a very short attention span. I’m supposed to believe him when he tells me – as I know he will – that he’s a changed man and looking forward to the hard work ahead of him to preserve the integrity of his father’s legacy and the wellbeing of his employees. In fact, he and I both know he will sell to a corporate raider in the blink of an eye and float off to some hedonistic paradise without a second’s thought for his father or the people who worked hard to help build the company.”

  “Ah,” Ettie says, getting it at last. “It’s the lies that are wearing you out.”

  “All I get is spin,” Kate says, pulling the plug out of the sink. “One day, I’ll hear the truth and I won’t be able to recognise it and that’s just plain scary.” She uses the bottom of Ettie’s cloth to dry her hands as water glugs down the drain hole. “You know, when I was a young cadet on a daily newspaper I used to pity the subs who’d been there for years. I was told they’d been legends in their day. To me they just seemed like cynical old men hanging out for their lunchtime beers. But now I worry there’s a very real possibility that I could turn into them.”

  “So that’s why you’re in Cook’s Basin. You’re looking for a bit of sanity, which is a bit weird if you don’t mind me saying so, ’cause most of the population thinks you’ve got to be nuts to live here.”

  Kate laughs. “Maybe my mother is right, then, and I have lost the plot.”

  “Or maybe you’re just beginning to find it,” Ettie says gently.

  Kate’s grin lights up her pale face. “Maybe I am.”

  Ettie tries not to think about her own scrambled existence. Was there a turn-off to fulfilment somewhere along the way that she missed? A fork in the road that failed to mention left was for battlers, right for swanners? She wonders if Kate is still young enough to believe that something wondrous will suddenly pop out of the ether to light up a new path. Ettie has been burned too often to trust in miracles herself. A failed marriage. An erratic career as an artist and illustrator. A few attempts at jobs such as corporate catering (the company went bust) and therapeutic massage (an ad in the paper prompted so many late-night calls for the wrong kind of massage she gave up).

  There was also a brief, horrendously misjudged plunge into running a florist shop where she built the business but could never resist adding one or two extra blooms to a bunch, thus cancelling out the profit margin. Until then, she’d never realised generosity could send you broke. She also understood that it wasn’t enoug
h to be good at your job. If you wanted to run a successful business, you needed to understand the bottom line. And she just didn’t get it, no matter how hard she tried. She quit at the end of her first year, wiser but with virtually nothing to show for twelve months of hard slog. Trusting in miracles, she believes, is borderline suicidal.

  Kate crosses the kitchen to open the freezer. A puff of misty air spreads across the room. She removes the last of the chocolate cake and holds it aloft with her eyebrows raised in a query towards Ettie.

  “Yeah. Why not? A little sweetness takes away the fullness.”

  “Chocolate does that?” Kate gives her a funny look.

  “Works for me.”

  Sitting on his deck with his all-time favourite dinner of sausages, garlic mashed potatoes and peas, Sam automatically checks to see that his barge is still safe on her mooring. She’s a miracle, he thinks, an indefatigable workhorse with shapely lines and a glorious rear end. He sips a frigidly cold beer and it hits him then that his fortieth birthday is a day away. He toys with the idea of throwing a last-minute bash but can’t work up the enthusiasm. A sign, maybe, that his priorities are shifting? He is hit by a wave of nostalgia and half-closes his eyes. In his mind his mother wanders down the jetty to meet him off the school ferry. Ready with a story: a snake in the woodpile … a duck with ten ducklings paddling in her slipstream … a blank-eyed stingray cruising the shallows. She would always have a tea towel over her shoulder. A short-sleeved floral shirt. Plain cotton shorts. Her feet were bare and brown. Legs and arms, too.

  “Good day?” she’d invariably ask. And he’d shrug by way of an answer.

  “Daisy’s boxer had her pups on the ferry this morning. Right at my feet. Just leaned sideways and out they popped, one by one. Like squeezing pips out of a cherry.”

  “Yeah right, Mum. Pull the other one.”

  “Honest as, love. Six pups. Did you know that Dottie waxes her legs? Never heard of it before. Must hurt like heck.”

  One summer day, she ran down the jetty to meet him, face flushed with what he knew must be big news. He tried to guess. A shark in the bay? A giant fish on the line? Maybe a decent dinghy washed up at high tide that he might be able to keep if they couldn’t find the owner?

  “The bay ran dry today,” she told him. Breathless. In the same incredulous tones you’d use if an alien had just dropped out of the sky.

  “Yeah. Yeah.” Sam was disappointed. Didn’t his mother know he was too old to fall for dumb tricks?

  “No, love, no joke. I was looking out the window while I did the breakfast dishes and the whole bay emptied. Like someone had pulled the plug. Got a bull’s-eye view. Soldier crabs on the march, not sure which way to turn and crashing into each other. Water tanks. Rotting hulls. A cannon. A whole universe of sea creatures clinging to our rubbish and turning it into homes. Rent free!” She laughed, delighted with the thought. In the Scully family, the monthly rent payments regularly flattened the fizz in the household savings account. “A bold, new landscape. And a wee bit ghostly.”

  “Then what happened?” he asked, eyes narrowed.

  “Well, I waited. Sort of paralysed with shock. I thought later that if I’d had my wits about me I would’ve run for the hills because it was crazy! Bays don’t empty, not around here. Not unless some catastrophe is about to happen. I stuck my head out the window and watched, wondering if I was in a dream and didn’t know it. Suddenly, the water came back in a mad, frothing rush. Fish were tossed high. Driftwood flew through the air. Water came up to my knees in the boatshed. The whole event took about ten minutes, and within fifteen it was as though it had never happened.”

  Sam grinned, sure now that it was a hoax. “You’re havin’ me on, Mum, aren’t ya?”

  She didn’t reply. Instead she reached for his hand and walked him along the jetty to the beach. Then she pointed to a few dead tiddlers stranded way above the seawall.

  “How do you think they got there?”

  Sam was flummoxed. He trusted his mum, but she’d always told him to question what he hadn’t seen with his own eyes. To seek the truth before making a judgement. And this was downright spooky. Fish didn’t fall out of the sky. No way.

  “Did Dad see it?” he asked, thinking witnesses were the only way to go.

  “No. He was in the city. He doesn’t do a ferry shift on Wednesdays, remember?”

  “Anyone else see it?” No witnesses, no deal.

  His mum smiled then, and pointed to a peeling old shack across the bay.

  “The Heggartys were home. Want to row over in the boat and ask them?”

  Sam dithered. The Heggartys were ancient and a bit potty. Once they got yacking, he’d be trapped for the rest of the afternoon. Still, old Mrs Heggarty cooked a decent shortbread biscuit and kept a good supply in a jar on the kitchen counter next to the tea. He had nothing to lose. He set off.

  Two hours later he returned. “Tsunami,” he said, looking at his feet, cranky he hadn’t twigged earlier. “Mild. Caused by an earthquake a long way away. It’s the second time the Heggartys have seen it happen here.”

  His mother looked vindicated but she wasn’t the type to gloat. “Mrs Heggarty have any biscuits?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “She was about to make a batch when I turned up.”

  His mother ruffled his hair. “Come inside.” She pulled a tray of scones out of the half kerosene tin perched on a gas ring that they called an oven, slathered on butter and honey. “You’re a good boy. It never hurts to question even your old mother’s words. Always remember that.”

  They had nothing in those early days, Sam thought. No phone, no electricity. No radio. The three of them ate, slept and played in a single room. A chip heater for hot water. The rise and fall of the sea cleaning away their sewage. He never once heard his mother complain, even when those huge king tides flooded her floors and wet her knitting if she’d forgotten to put the basket on a shelf. He remembered the awe of an early misty morning when he went off fishing with his dad and came home with a kingfish so big all the neighbours dropped by with their measuring tapes. He feels the old familiar ache of loss creep into his gut.

  Sam sighs. Toys with the idea of another beer. He’s watched the boat traffic all evening. Too many tinnies have come to a standstill at the Weasel’s wharf and it’s giving him a very bad feeling.

  Kate lines up the chocolate cake on a plate.

  “Cream’s in the fridge, is it?” Ettie says, opening up to have a search. “Oh. This is the sort that needs to be whipped. Next time, buy double cream. Works better with cakes. Well, except for sponges. And it’s less effort.”

  “Oh. Okay. I’ve always thought of cream as … just cream. Tea?” Kate asks.

  “Coffee if you’ve got it.”

  “No coffee. Sorry.”

  “Tea’s fine.”

  “Marco Polo, Earl Grey, Sencha or Russian Caravan? I don’t have anything else that isn’t medicinal, I’m afraid.”

  “Marco Polo,” Ettie says, trying not to sound astonished.

  She watches Kate, curious to see how a woman who is indifferent to food prepares a delicate brew of exotic tea. She crosses her fingers but expects the worst.

  Kate warms and drains a fragile bone china teapot with a lissom spout and painted with tiny pink flowers. She adds two heaped teaspoons of tea and snatches the kettle off the heat a second after it bubbles. She waits half a minute before pouring water over the leaves. The mysterious scent of fruit, some floral hints and definitely vanilla, fills the kitchen. Flavours that would burn if the water was spitting hot. The lid goes on with a light clink. Ettie nods with approval.

  Kate places two delicate cups and saucers, like props out of an Agatha Christie movie, on a tray with the pot. Ettie follows her back to the sitting room and watches her pour the copper-coloured tea with tight-lipped concentration. She passes Ettie a cup. Not a moment too long in the pot, Ettie thinks. Every flavour is distinct even if she can’t quite pin them all down. The two women sit
silently, each lost in thought until Ettie replaces her cup on the tray.

  “Shall I make a fresh pot?” Kate asks.

  “No. I’m feeling full and sleepy. It’s time to go.”

  Ettie stands with a sigh of contentment and makes her way to the front door. Kate holds her wet-weather jacket while she slips her arms through the sleeves.

  “I’m thinking of buying a boat,” Kate says. “Nothing flash. To go back and forth to the Spit. Who do you think I should talk to?”

  “Sam Scully on the Mary Kay. You’ve met him, right? He delivered your building material. Get him to ask around. If I see him, I’ll mention it. And don’t worry about the house while you’re away. Everyone will keep an eye on it. That’s how Cook’s Basin works. God, look at the moon. Magic, isn’t it? Don’t come down to the pontoon, it’s too cold. I’ll see myself off.”

  Carefully Ettie makes her way down the steps to the foreshore, grateful for the moonlight. Thirty years of offshore living, she thinks, and she still forgets to take her torch with her.

  Frankie has left her boat tied to Kate’s pontoon. She can see it’s sitting higher out of the water and the greasy broth of oil, petrol and seawater that normally swashes in the bottom has disappeared. She finds a note wrapped around the tiller, held on with a rubber band. She fossicks under the dented bow for the torch and in the thin yellow light of a near-dead battery, she reads:

  Dear Ettie.

  Lights work. Bum scraped. Spark plugs cleaned.

  One cake, a big one, in return.

  Frankie.

  Chocolate is best. The wicked one.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  In the Square, Ettie fingers the latest rejection from a publisher, folded into a tiny solid block in her pocket. Not even a note, this time. Just an unsigned With Compliments slip. Was the irony deliberate, she wonders? She feels a whang-bang dose of the blues on the rise.

  The stray mutt crawls towards her apologetically and flops at her feet. She rubs his ears. “Good doggie,” she says. Inside the café, Sam is slouched over the counter, ordering their coffees from Big Julie.