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Up Front, For My Sister

Karen, I started writing this a few months ago, about seven weeks after the accident, and I think it’s for you but I’m not sure. It may still be another few months before you’re ready to see it. Forgive me if it takes that long - if it takes me a while to trust that you could handle it and understand it right. Forgive me if I tell you too many things you already know, because there have been so many times when I haven’t been sure if you did know them.

It’s not quite a diary because sometimes I cheat. I go back and change and add, like this part, pasted in. I’m trying to resist doing that, because I think there is - there has to be - a journey here. From grey to black and white, from addiction to love, from what’s fake to what’s true. And if I cheat then the journey won’t be clear for either of us.

I’m inconsistent about it, though. I want to pour out some stuff now before the story even gets started. There are three crimes involved here, their threads weaving the wrong colours through my life as if they’re from someone else’s length of fabric. In the end, though, Karen, I’ve found that I just have to adopt the new colours into the pattern, because I’ve realised they’re not going to go away.

One of them was the crime against you - the hit-and-run. We’re never going to get an answer on that one. The police have said so. No answer on who… I don’t want to say ruined… who crashed your life onto its new course.

Then came the fire, and I have unanswered questions about that, too. What was I really seeing when I scrabbled frantically amongst the charred remains? Something I could have prevented? Predicted? Something I should applaud?

The final crime, yes, I should definitely have predicted. A sin, really, not a crime. A crime against my heart. Oh, but they were all crimes against my heart, Karen, all three of them. Please read this, and tell me what you think.

Monday, September 16

I’m in the kitchen at ten o’clock at night, trying to re-discover cheese - failing - when Jody walks in, eyes dry and hands cramped from driving. He’s unfamiliar. It’ll take my desire a little time to kick in. Ten minutes? An hour? A day? We haven’t seen each other since early July.

It’s raining hard, colder than it has been for most of the winter. Neil and Nonie, who own the house (but are not of particular significance in my life), have just gone to bed. The ski season has been terrible and Jody has had long stretches with minimal work. He turned in his ski school jacket this afternoon, I discover. He packed up his gear and drove without a break from Jindabyne to Sydney in four and a half hours.

He hugs me, and the familiarity begins to stir inside me like a small animal waking from long sleep.

“You didn’t tell me you were coming.” It’s not really an accusation.

It is.

It is! When I phoned him seven weeks ago, broke the news about Karen’s accident and told him he didn’t need to come down, he said, “Okay, if that’s what you want,” and he didn’t come.

It wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted insistence. “Of course I’ll come.”

Now, half a lifetime later, he’s here.

“Yeah,” he says vaguely. “I wasn’t thinking.” He’s talking about today, not seven weeks ago. “I meant to text you…”

He kisses me short but deep, and despite the other animal stirring inside me - the angry, accusing one - it feels right, a prelude to more. We hug again. Tight. Warm. “You’ve lost weight,” he says.

I answer, into the shirt fabric on his shoulder, “I haven’t been enjoying food much lately.”

He stills, and on snaps the light in his bright mind. “God!” He pulls back a little, and examines my face, shocked on my behalf. He’s the first person to understand, the way he so often is. “That’s not good.”

“No,” is all I can say.

You can divide the world into two kinds of people - the ones who eat too much when they’re stressed, and the ones who can hardly eat at all. Put me in the second group.

“And it’s not as if you had a lot to lose,” he says. “Bit, maybe.” His usual blunt approach. “Three or four kilos. But you’ve lost more than that. You’re thin, now.”

We talk about it for a few minutes. I show him the cheese tasting experiment, which isn’t working. I got home from cooking at the restaurant at nine-thirty. We only did fourteen covers. Typical for a wet Monday. Julie only makes any money at all on a night like this because her overheads are so low. The crab cakes went down well. But I didn’t do the blue cheese souffles, and I should have.

This was what started me on the cheese experiment. The menu tonight was thin. Julie shrugs about things like this and forgives me more readily than my own mother would, and more readily than I forgive myself. It’s not guilt, so much. As Jody has recognised so fast, it’s fear.

Will I still have a cooking career by the time Karen is better?

“Is there anything that pleasures you?” he asks. He trains his blue eyes upon me, computing a solution to my problem. “Chocolate? Soup?”

“I’m living on coffee.”

“Try coffee, then. Taste it like wine. Explore it. See if that brings back the joy. I brought some of mine.”

Striding to where he’s dumped his things in the lounge-room (floorboards creak under the old carpet) he unpacks the coffee from his boxes of left-over food. There’s his French Breakfast Blend, his Mocha Java, his Sumatra Dark, each in its own packet, neatly crimped at the top.

He offers to make me a cup but my face folds into a blah look and I say no. Not sleeping well enough as it is. Don’t need caffeine at this hour. And his idea doesn’t feel quite right, anyhow. I don’t want to explore coffee like wine. If I’m going to explore coffee, it’ll be in a different way.

“I’m hungry,” he says, so we put away the King Island Camembert and the Stilton but keep out the sharp Tasmanian cheddar, with which he makes himself piles of cheese on toast.

While the last slices of it are still bubbling under the heat, he tells me what he’s been thinking about in the car, what made him forget to text me, and by the time we’re lying on the carpet in front of the two-bar radiant heater, the words are pouring out of him.

He has decided to run a workshop.

Ta-da!

“It’s brilliant,” he tells me.

This isn’t the mood I’d have chosen to find him in upon his unexpected return. Sometimes he’s softer. Sometimes I’m the full and total beneficiary of his focus, as I was just for those few minutes when he noticed I’d lost weight and understood how scary that was.

He tells me the whole workshop plan as far as he’s taken it at this point, after hours of driving on auto-pilot down the freeway and the M5, brain clicking away. I spread my hands over his back as I listen. His shirt is dry and hot against my palms. He hasn’t mentioned Karen yet. We’ve talked about her a lot on the phone, of course, but right now that doesn’t feel as if it counts.

“You see, I’ve got to have at least another $20,000. Net. In hand. By December.”

He crunches beguiling numbers. Twelve participants. $2,500 each. $30,000. Minus a few insignificant costs. Couple of weeks work, a month at most. Brilliant.

“You’ve got to be in it, Susie. I know it’ll reduce the income to $27,500, but I’m going to need you.”

“What about the restaurant?”

“We’ll work it out.”

“And Karen.”

You. My sister. The reason I’ve been coasting at the restaurant, just lately. The reason for my lost weight, the food problem, the coffee.

“How is she?” he asks at last.

“Getting there.”

I wait for more, toy with my anger a bit, wonder whether to tell him that he let me down.

But I said I’d come down and you told me not to.

I have no appetite for that dry logic tonight.

“Actually, the other way to do it...” He pauses. His mouth is full. The oil that has sweated from the melted cheese seams his lips. “...would be to spread it over several weekends. I’d been thinking of a total immersion for six days, but spreading it out would be better. I could charge more. $2,800? You could get Julie to bring in one of those guest chef friends of hers to cook for you, couldn’t you? Just four Saturdays between now and December?”

“Why do you want me in it, Jody?” He’s still detailing the wrong things.

“For support. Obviously you won’t say that we live together, or even that we know each other. You’ll just pretend to be a person off the street. My shill, yeah?”

“Your shill...”

He hauls himself up. He’s full of energy for this, as he’s full of energy for everything, and he believes everything he says. “You’ll have to sell it, talk it up. What amazing insights you’re getting, how much you’re growing and changing, so that the others - the real participants - the marks - know they’re getting their money’s worth.”

“The marks?”

“The people I’m - not fleecing, not scamming.”

“Not?”

“Not really. Not from their perspective. They’re going to think it’s incredible.”

He goes looking for paper and a pen to write down ideas. He has notebooks full of ideas. Concepts for short films about extreme sports. A house he’s going to build one day, with his own hands, in Wales or Maine or Byron Bay. Articles to write and sell to airline magazines. Last year, he wrote three, and sold two of them. Not to mention sculpture, embroidery, quilts. He goes through periods when he can’t bear for his fingers to be idle. He scrounges left-over fabric scraps, ribbons and threads from everyone he knows who’s ever sewed. We have one of his quilts on our bed.

Occasionally, he even writes essays.

He craves more time. Doesn’t understand why everyone doesn’t have ideas like this. “It’s not like I try.” They just wander into his head. Sometimes they sit benignly for years, to be returned to occasionally and mulled over. Sometimes they burn and eat at him until he follows them through. He is genuinely bemused by the fact that other people are not like this.

I’m sometimes like this.

I was.

I think.

But only about food.

I have a brown cardboard expanding file of recipes upstairs in the office at the restaurant, things I’ve been collecting and tinkering with for eight years, but I haven’t added to it since July. Haven’t looked at it. Somewhere in this house, or possibly thrown away, is the last scribbled idea I wrote down the night of Karen’s accident, minutes before Dad called.

Something involving artichokes? I can’t even remember.

Jody comes back with the message book and felt-tip pen from beside the phone, which Neil and Nonie will hate. The book and pen are only to be used for messages.

“I couldn’t find a decent pen.”

He scribbles madly and I watch, the skin on my face going tight from the radiant heat of those glowing orange bars. I turn over and heat my back instead. A strand of hair drops into my mouth and I suck on it nervously. It tastes no worse than the cheese.

Oh, great, I’m thinking. A workshop, now. A scam-that-they-won’t-think-is-a-scam. Do I need this complication in his darting, charismatic ambitions?

It’s no good telling him I think it’s immoral. He’ll have arguments that are better than mine, to prove I’m wrong. The emotional centre of the argument will shift from the question of the workshop to the fact that I always get tongue-tied and he has no patience, talks me down. As if it’s a competition he’s determined to win, instead of an attempt to communicate constructively about our differences.

But I tell him anyway.

“I think it’s immoral.”

“Why? I knew you’d say that.” He’s energised by the fact of being right.

“Because you’re ripping people off.”

“How? It’s not as if I’m going to take their money and then not do the workshop.”

We digress into a whole argument about Ferran Adria’s Michelin three-star restaurant, El Bulli, in Spain, which some food people rave about and others think is the palate equivalent of the emperor without his clothes. Since I’ve only heard about it and haven’t eaten there, I’m not taking sides, but Jody (who also hasn’t eaten there) draws out a ruthless analogy and runs with it.

“If you think you’re eating great food, then you are. Having great sex. Learning great truths. Substitute any words you like.”

“But you don’t believe in it. Feng Shui, and Reiki and past life therapy.” I’m floundering, as usual.

“But they’ll believe in it. That’s why it’ll work. Know what I mean? What’s belief, anyway? Maybe it’s belief that creates reality. It’s all relative.”

Jody claims to have a degree in Philosophy from Cambridge University, and mostly I believe him, despite the lack of concrete evidence. There’s this idea in Philosophy, apparently, that the laws of gravity didn’t exist until Newton discovered them. Or something. It has been a surprise to me, since knowing Jody, how applicable this concept is to many of the events of everyday life. Tonight’s subject of discussion is obviously one of them.

“What are you going to do in it, though?” I ask, thinking that maybe the practical details will provide a stumbling block.

No such luck.

“Tons of stuff. Massage, relaxation, trust work, games. Probably, yeah, past life therapy.” He scribbles something. “I’ll research it on the Net. Awakening your dragons. Crystal energy, maybe.”

“You see? What do you really know about it? When have you done massage?”

“When I was in Mooncalf.” This is another of the previous careers he lays claim to - struggling actor in an experimental London theatre collective. Before we met.

There’s a silence, then he changes the subject. “What time are you going to the hospital?”

“Nine-ish.”

“That early?”

“I always go for about three hours after I’ve been to the markets and set up at the restaurant.”

“Your parents aren’t up this week?”

“No, week after next.”

It is a bland exchange, like so much of the dialogue between established couples, but there’s a lot beneath the surface. I can’t believe it has been nearly two months since Karen’s accident. Jody thinks I shouldn’t spend so much time with her and that my parents should spend a lot more. I agree with him on that last one, but I’m still waiting for something else, something better.

Something I can bite into.

Reassurance, or a reason to attack.

It doesn’t come.

And I’m tired so I go upstairs, leaving Jody to clean up. Turns out he doesn’t. In the morning, there’s still one slice of cheese on toast sitting there, cold and brittle on the crumb-encrusted plate, and the phone message book beside it, minus twelve pages and the pen.

The coffee experiment

If today is a cup of coffee, it has to be a big, piping hot café au lait, served in a bowl the way they often do in France. I drink it with my hands curved around the bowl for warmth - and for safety - but if I’m not careful, the corner of my mouth snags on the chip in the rim. A couple of days later, I get a cold sore, crusty and stinging, and I wonder if the chip in the rim has caused it.